THE LOVE OF BOOKS
THE PHILOBIBLON OF RICHARD DE BURYTRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH BY E. C. THOMAS

"TAKE THOU A BOOK INTO THINE HANDS AS SIMON THE
JUST TOOK THE CHILD JESUS INTO HIS ARMS TO CARRY HIM AND KISS HIM. AND WHEN
THOU HAST FINISHED READING, CLOSE THE BOOK AND GIVE THANKS FOR EVERY WORD OUT
OF THE MOUTH OF GOD; BECAUSE IN THE LORD'S FIELD THOU HAST FOUND A HIDDEN
TREASURE."
THOMAS A KEMPIS: Doctrinale Juvenum

The Author of the Book. Richard de Bury (1281-1345), so called from being
born near Bury St. Edmunds, was the son of Sir Richard Aungerville. He studied
at Oxford; and was subsequently chosen to be tutor to Prince Edward of Windsor,
afterwards Edward III. His loyalty to the cause of Queen Isabella and the Prince
involved him in danger. On the accession of his pupil he was made successively
Cofferer, Treasurer of the Wardrobe, Archdeacon of Northampton, Prebendary of
Lincoln, Sarum, and Lichfield, Keeper of the Privy Purse, Ambassador on two
occasions to Pope John XXII, who appointed him a chaplain of the papal chapel,
Dean of Wells, and ultimately, at the end of the year 1333, Bishop of Durham;
the King and Queen, the King of Scots, and all the magnates north of the Trent,
together with a multitude of nobles and many others, were present at his
enthronization. It is noteworthy that during his stay at Avignon, probably in
1330, he made the acquaintance of Petrarch, who has left us a brief account of
their intercourse. In 1332 Richard visited Cambridge, as one of the King's
commissioners, to inquire into the state of the King's Scholars there, and
perhaps then became a member of the Gild of St. Mary--one of the two gilds which
founded Corpus Christi College.

In 1334 he became High Chancellor of England, and Treasurer in 1336,
resigning the former office in 1335, so that he might help the King in dealing
with affairs abroad and in Scotland, and took a most distinguished part in
diplomatic negociations between England and France. In 1339 he was again in his
bishopric. Thereafter his name occurs often among those appointed to treat of
peace with Philip of France, and with Bruce of Scotland. It appears that he was
not in Parliament in 1344. Wasted by long sickness--longa infirmitate decoctus--on
the 14th of April, 1345, Richard de Bury died at Auckland, and was buried in
Durham Cathedral.

Dominus Ricardus de Bury migravit ad
Dominum.

The Bishop as Booklover. According to the concluding note, the Philobiblon
was completed on the bishop's fifty-eighth birthday, the 24th of January, 1345,
so that even though weakened by illness, Richard must have been actively engaged
in his literary efforts to the very end of his generous and noble life. His
enthusiastic devoted biographer Chambre[1] gives a vivid
account of the bishop's bookloving propensities, supplementary to what can be
gathered from the Philobiblon itself. Iste summe delectabatur in multitudine
librorum; he had more books, as was commonly reported, than all the other
English bishops put together. He had a separate library in each of his
residences, and wherever he was residing, so many books lay about his
bed-chamber, that it was hardly possible to stand or move without treading upon
them. All the time he could spare from business was devoted either to religious
offices or to his books. Every day while at table he would have a book read to
him, unless some special guest were present, and afterwards would engage in
discussion on the subject of the reading. The haughty Anthony Bec delighted in
the appendages of royalty--to be addressed by nobles kneeling, and to be waited
on in his presence-chamber and at his table by Knights bare-headed and standing;
but De Bury loved to surround himself with learned scholars. Among these were
such men as Thomas Bradwardine, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, and author
of the De Causa Dei; Richard Fitzralph, afterwards Archbishop of Armagh, and
famous for his hostility to the mendicant orders; Walter Burley, who dedicated
to him a translation of the Politics of Aristototle made at his suggestion; John
Mauduit, the astronomer; Robert Holkot, author of many books; Richard de
Kilvington; Richard Benworth, afterwards Bishop of London; and Walter Seagrave,
who became Dean of Chichester."[2]

The Bishop's Books. In the Philobiblon, Richard de Bury frankly and clearly
describes his means and method of collecting books. Anyhow his object was
clearly not selfish. The treatise contains his rules for the library of the new
College at Oxford--Durham College (where Trinity College now stands)--which he
practically founded, though his successor, Bishop Hatfield, carried the scheme
into effect. It is traditionally reported that Richard's books were sent, in his
lifetime or after his death, to the house of the Durham Benedictines at Oxford,
and there remained until the dissolution of the College by Henry VIII., when
they were dispersed, some going into Duke Humphrey's (the University) library,
others to Balliol College, and the remainder passing into the hands of Dr.
George Owen, who purchased the site of the dissolved College.[3]

Unfortunately, the "special catalogue" of his books prepared by
Richard has not come down to us; but "from his own book and from the books
cited in the works of his friends and housemates, who may reasonably be supposed
to have drawn largely from the bishop's collection, it would be possible to
restore a hypothetical but not improbable Bibliotheca Ricardi de Bury. The
difficulty would be with that contemporary literature, which they would think
below the dignity of quotation, but which we know the Bishop collected."

Early Editions of the Philobiblon. The book was first printed at Cologne in
1473, at Spires in 1483, and at Paris in 1500. The first English edition
appeared in 1598-9, edited by Thomas James, Bodley's first librarian. Other
editions appeared in Germany in 1610, 1614, 1674 and 1703; at Paris in 1856; at
Albany in 1861. The texts were, with the exception of those issued in 1483 and
1599, based on the 1473 edition; though the French edition and translation of
1856, prepared by M. Cocheris, claimed to be a critical version, it left the
text untouched, and merely gave the various readings of the three Paris
manuscripts at the foot of the pages; these readings are moreover badly chosen,
and the faults of the version are further to be referred to the use of the ill-
printed 1703 edition as copy.

In 1832 there appeared an anonymous English translation, now known to have
been by J. B. Inglis; it followed the edition of 1473, with all its errors and
inaccuracies.

Mr. E. C. Thomas' Text.--The first true text of the Philobiblon, the result
of a careful examination of twenty-eight MSS., and of the various printed
editions, appeared in the year 1888:

"The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham, Treasurer and
Chancellor of Edward III, edited and translated by Ernest C. Thomas, Barrister-
at-law, late Scholar of Trinity College, Oxford, and Librarian of the Oxford
Union. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co."

For fifteen years the enthusiastic editor--an ideal Bibliophile--had toiled
at his labour of love, and his work was on all sides received with the
recognition due to his monumental achievement. To the great loss of English
learning, he did not long survive the conclusion of his labours. The very
limited edition of the work was soon exhausted, and it is by the most generous
permission of his father, Mr. John Thomas, of Lower Broughton, Manchester, that
the translation--the only trustworthy rendering of Richard de Bury's precious
treatise--is now, for the first time, made accessible to the larger book-loving
public, and fittingly inaugurates the present series of English classics. The
general Editor desires to express his best thanks to Mr. John Thomas, as also to
Messrs. Kegan Paul, for their kindness in allowing him to avail himself of the
materials included in the 1888 edition of the work. He has attempted, in the
brief Preface and Notes, to condense Mr. Thomas' labours in such a way as would
have been acceptable to the lamented scholar, and though he has made bold to
explain some few textual difficulties, and to add some few references, he would
fain hope that these additions have been made with modest caution--with the
reverence due to the unstinted toil of a Bibliophile after Richard de Bury's own
pattern. Yet once again Richard de Bury's Philobiblon, edited and translated
into English by E. C. Thomas, is presented to new generations of book-lovers:--
"LIBRORUM DILECTORIBUS."

To all the faithful of Christ to whom the tenor of these presents may come,
Richard de Bury, by the divine mercy Bishop of Durham, wisheth everlasting
salvation in the Lord and to present continually a pious memorial of himself
before God, alike in his lifetime and after his death.

What shall I render unto the Lord for all His benefits towards me? asks the
most devout Psalmist, an invincible King and first among the prophets; in which
most grateful question he approves himself a willing thank-offerer, a
multifarious debtor, and one who wishes for a holier counsellor than himself:
agreeing with Aristotle, the chief of philosophers, who shows (in the 3rd and
6th books of his Ethics) that all action depends upon counsel.

And indeed if so wonderful a prophet, having a fore-knowledge of divine
secrets, wished so anxiously to consider how he might gratefully repay the
blessings graciously bestowed, what can we fitly do, who are but rude
thanksgivers and most greedy receivers, laden with infinite divine benefits?
Assuredly we ought with anxious deliberation and abundant consideration, having
first invoked the Sevenfold Spirit, that it may burn in our musings as an
illuminating fire, fervently to prepare a way without hinderance, that the
bestower of all things may be cheerfully worshipped in return for the gifts that
He has bestowed, that our neighbour may be relieved of his burden, and that the
guilt contracted by sinners every day may be redeemed by the atonement of
almsgiving.

Forewarned therefore through the admonition of the Psalmist's devotion by Him
who alone prevents and perfects the goodwill of man, without Whom we have no
power even so much as to think, and Whose gift we doubt not it is, if we have
done anything good, we have diligently inquired and considered in our own heart
as well as with others, what among the good offices of various works of piety
would most please the Almighty, and would be more beneficial to the Church
Militant. And lo! there soon occurred to our contemplation a host of unhappy,
nay, rather of elect scholars, in whom God the Creator and Nature His handmaid
planted the roots of excellent morals and of famous sciences, but whom the
poverty of their circumstances so oppressed that before the frown of adverse
fortune the seeds of excellence, so fruitful in the cultivated field of youth,
not being watered by the rain that they require, are forced to wither away. Thus
it happens that "bright virtue lurks buried in obscurity," to use the
words of Boethius, and burning lights are not put under a bushel, but for want
of oil are utterly extinguished. Thus the field, so full of flower in Spring,
has withered up before harvest time; thus wheat degenerates to tares, and vines
into the wild vines, and thus olives run into the wild olive; the tender stems
rot away altogether, and those who might have grown up into strong pillars of
the Church, being endowed with the capacity of a subtle intellect, abandon the
schools of learning. With poverty only as their stepmother, they are repelled
violently from the nectared cup of philosophy as soon as they have tasted of it
and have become more fiercely thirsty by the very taste. Though fit for the
liberal arts and disposed to study the sacred writings alone, being deprived of
the aid of their friends, by a kind of apostasy they return to the mechanical
arts solely to gain a livelihood, to the loss of the Church and the degradation
of the whole clergy. Thus Mother Church conceiving sons is compelled to
miscarry, nay, some misshapen monster is born untimely from her womb, and for
lack of that little with which Nature is contented, she loses excellent pupils,
who might afterwards become champions and athletes of the faith. Alas, how
suddenly the woof is cut, while the hand of the weaver is beginning his work!
Alas, how the sun is eclipsed in the brightness of the dawn, and the planet in
its course is hurled backwards, and, while it bears the nature and likeness of a
star suddenly drops and becomes a meteor! What more piteous sight can the pious
man behold? What can more sharply stir the bowels of his pity? What can more
easily melt a heart hard as an anvil into hot tears? On the other hand, let us
recall from past experience how much it has profited the whole Christian
commonwealth, not indeed to enervate students with the delights of a
Sardanapalus or the riches of a Croesus, but rather to support them in their
poverty with the frugal means that become the scholar. How many have we seen
with our eyes, how many have we read of in books, who, distinguished by no pride
of birth, and rejoicing in no rich inheritance, but supported only by the piety
of the good, have made their way to apostolic chairs, have most worthily
presided over faithful subjects, have bent the necks of the proud and lofty to
the ecclesiastical yoke and have extended further the liberties of the Church!

Accordingly, having taken a survey of human necessities in every direction,
with a view to bestow our charity upon them, our compassionate inclinations have
chosen to bear pious aid to this calamitous class of men, in whom there is
nevertheless such hope of advantage to the Church, and to provide for them, not
only in respect of things necessary to their support, but much more in respect
of the books so useful to their studies. To this end, most acceptable in the
sight of God, our attention has long been unweariedly devoted. This ecstatic
love has carried us away so powerfully, that we have resigned all thoughts of
other earthly things, and have given ourselves up to a passion for acquiring
books. That our intent and purpose, therefore, may be known to posterity as well
as to our contemporaries, and that we may for ever stop the perverse tongues of
gossipers as far as we are concerned, we have published a little treatise
written in the lightest style of the moderns; for it is ridiculous to find a
slight matter treated of in a pompous style. And this treatise (divided into
twenty chapters) will clear the love we have had for books from the charge of
excess, will expound the purpose of our intense devotion, and will narrate more
clearly than light all the circumstances of our undertaking. And because it
principally treats of the love of books, we have chosen, after the fashion of
the ancient Romans, fondly to name it by a Greek word, Philobiblon.

The desirable treasure of wisdom and science, which all men desire by an
instinct of nature, infinitely surpasses all the riches of the world; in respect
of which precious stones are worthless; in comparison with which silver is as
clay and pure gold is as a little sand; at whose splendour the sun and moon are
dark to look upon; compared with whose marvellous sweetness honey and manna are
bitter to the taste. O value of wisdom that fadeth not away with time, virtue
ever flourishing, that cleanseth its possessor from all venom! O heavenly gift
of the divine bounty, descending from the Father of lights, that thou mayest
exalt the rational soul to the very heavens! Thou art the celestial nourishment
of the intellect, which those who eat shall still hunger and those who drink
shall still thirst, and the gladdening harmony of the languishing soul which he
that hears shall never be confounded. Thou art the moderator and rule of morals,
which he who follows shall not sin. By thee kings reign and princes decree
justice. By thee, rid of their native rudeness, their minds and tongues being
polished, the thorns of vice being torn up by the roots, those men attain high
places of honour, and become fathers of their country, and companions of
princes, who without thee would have melted their spears into pruning-hooks and
ploughshares, or would perhaps be feeding swine with the prodigal.

Certes, thou hast placed thy tabernacle in books, where the Most High, the
Light of lights, the Book of Life, has established thee. There everyone who asks
receiveth thee, and everyone who seeks finds thee, and to everyone that knocketh
boldly it is speedily opened. Therein the cherubim spread out their wings, that
the intellect of the students may ascend and look from pole to pole, from the
east and west, from the north and from the south. Therein the mighty and
incomprehensible God Himself is apprehensibly contained and worshipped; therein
is revealed the nature of things celestial, terrestrial, and infernal; therein
are discerned the laws by which every state is administered, the offices of the
celestial hierarchy are distinguished, and the tyrannies of demons described,
such as neither the ideas of Plato transcend, nor the chair of Crato contained.

In books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to
come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of
peace. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour
the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in
oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.

Alexander, the conqueror of the earth, Julius, the invader of Rome and of the
world, who, the first in war and arts, assumed universal empire under his single
rule, faithful Fabricius and stern Cato, would now have been unknown to fame, if
the aid of books had been wanting. Towers have been razed to the ground; cities
have been overthrown; triumphal arches have perished from decay; nor can either
pope or king find any means of more easily conferring the privilege of
perpetuity than by books. The book that he has made renders its author this
service in return, that so long as the book survives its author remains immortal
and cannot die, as Ptolemy declares in the Prologue to his Almagest: He is not
dead, he says, who has given life to science.

Who therefore will limit by anything of another kind the price of the
infinite treasure of books, from which the scribe who is instructed bringeth
forth things new and old? Truth that triumphs over all things, which overcomes
the king, wine, and women, which it is reckoned holy to honour before
friendship, which is the way without turning and the life without end, which
holy Boethius considers to be threefold in thought, speech, and writing, seems
to remain more usefully and to fructify to greater profit in books. For the
meaning of the voice perishes with the sound; truth latent in the mind is wisdom
that is hid and treasure that is not seen; but truth which shines forth in books
desires to manifest itself to every impressionable sense. It commends itself to
the sight when it is read, to the hearing when it is heard, and moreover in a
manner to the touch, when it suffers itself to be transcribed, bound, corrected,
and preserved. The undisclosed truth of the mind, although it is the possession
of the noble soul, yet because it lacks a companion, is not certainly known to
be delightful, while neither sight nor hearing takes account of it. Further the
truth of the voice is patent only to the ear and eludes the sight, which reveals
to us more of the qualities of things, and linked with the subtlest of motions
begins and perishes as it were in a breath. But the written truth of books, not
transient but permanent, plainly offers itself to be observed, and by means of
the pervious spherules of the eyes, passing through the vestibule of perception
and the courts of imagination, enters the chamber of intellect, taking its place
in the couch of memory, where it engenders the eternal truth of the mind.

Finally we must consider what pleasantness of teaching there is in books, how
easy, how secret! How safely we lay bare the poverty of human ignorance to books
without feeling any shame! They are masters who instruct us without rod or
ferule, without angry words, without clothes or money. If you come to them they
are not asleep; if you ask and inquire of them they do not withdraw themselves;
they do not chide if you make mistakes; they do not laugh at you if you are
ignorant. O books, who alone are liberal and free, who give to all who ask of
you and enfranchise all who serve you faithfully! By how many thousand types are
ye commended to learned men in the Scriptures given us by inspiration of God!
For ye are the minds of profoundest wisdom, to which the wise man sends his son
that he may dig out treasures: Prov. ii. Ye are the wells of living waters,
which father Abraham first digged, Isaac digged again, and which the Philistines
strive to fill up: Gen. xxvi. Ye are indeed the most delightful ears of corn,
full of grain, to be rubbed only by apostolic hands, that the sweetest food may
be produced for hungry souls: Matt. xii. Ye are the golden pots in which manna
is stored, and rocks flowing with honey, nay, combs of honey, most plenteous
udders of the milk of life, garners ever full; ye are the tree of life and the
fourfold river of Paradise, by which the human mind is nourished, and the
thirsty intellect is watered and refreshed. Ye are the ark of Noah and the
ladder of Jacob, and the troughs by which the young of those who look therein
are coloured; ye are the stones of testimony and the pitchers holding the lamps
of Gideon, the scrip of David, from which the smoothest stones are taken for the
slaying of Goliath. Ye are the golden vessels of the temple, the arms of the
soldiers of the Church with which to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked,
fruitful olives, vines of Engadi, fig-trees that are never barren, burning lamps
always to be held in readiness--and all the noblest comparisons of Scripture may
be applied to books, if we choose to speak in figures.

Since the degree of affection a thing deserves depends upon the degree of its
value, and the previous chapter shows that the value of books is unspeakable, it
is quite clear to the reader what is the probable conclusion from this. I say
probable, for in moral science we do not insist upon demonstration, remembering
that the educated man seeks such degree of certainty as he perceives the
subject-matter will bear, as Aristotle testifies in the first book of his
Ethics. For Tully does not appeal to Euclid, nor does Euclid rely upon Tully.
This at all events we endeavour to prove, whether by logic or rhetoric, that all
riches and all delights whatsoever yield place to books in the spiritual mind,
wherein the Spirit which is charity ordereth charity. Now in the first place,
because wisdom is contained in books more than all mortals understand, and
wisdom thinks lightly of riches, as the foregoing chapter declares. Furthermore,
Aristotle, in his Problems, determines the question, why the ancients proposed
prizes to the stronger in gymnastic and corporeal contests, but never awarded
any prize for wisdom. This question he solves as follows: In gymnastic exercises
the prize is better and more desirable than that for which it is bestowed; but
it is certain that nothing is better than wisdom: wherefore no prize could be
assigned for wisdom. And therefore neither riches nor delights are more
excellent than wisdom. Again, only the fool will deny that friendship is to be
preferred to riches, since the wisest of men testifies this; but the chief of
philosophers honours truth before friendship, and the truthful Zorobabel prefers
it to all things. Riches, then, are less than truth. Now truth is chiefly
maintained and contained in holy books--nay, they are written truth itself,
since by books we do not now mean the materials of which they are made.
Wherefore riches are less than books, especially as the most precious of all
riches are friends, as Boethius testifies in the second book of his Consolation;
to whom the truth of books according to Aristotle is to be preferred. Moreover,
since we know that riches first and chiefly appertain to the support of the body
only, while the virtue of books is the perfection of reason, which is properly
speaking the happiness of man, it appears that books to the man who uses his
reason are dearer than riches. Furthermore, that by which the faith is more
easily defended, more widely spread, more clearly preached, ought to be more
desirable to the faithful. But this is the truth written in books, which our
Saviour plainly showed, when he was about to contend stoutly against the
Tempter, girding himself with the shield of truth and indeed of written truth,
declaring "it is written" of what he was about to utter with his
voice.

And, again, no one doubts that happiness is to be preferred to riches. But
happiness consists in the operation of the noblest and diviner of the faculties
that we possess--when the whole mind is occupied in contemplating the truth of
wisdom, which is the most delectable of all our virtuous activities, as the
prince of philosophers declares in the tenth book of the Ethics, on which
account it is that philosophy is held to have wondrous pleasures in respect of
purity and solidity, as he goes on to say. But the contemplation of truth is
never more perfect than in books, where the act of imagination perpetuated by
books does not suffer the operation of the intellect upon the truths that it has
seen to suffer interruption. Wherefore books appear to be the most immediate
instruments of speculative delight, and therefore Aristotle, the sun of
philosophic truth, in considering the principles of choice, teaches that in
itself to philosophize is more desirable than to be rich, although in certain
cases, as where for instance one is in need of necessaries, it may be more
desirable to be rich than to philosophize.

Moreover, since books are the aptest teachers, as the previous chapter
assumes, it is fitting to bestow on them the honour and the affection that we
owe to our teachers. In fine, since all men naturally desire to know, and since
by means of books we can attain the knowledge of the ancients, which is to be
desired beyond all riches, what man living according to nature would not feel
the desire of books? And although we know that swine trample pearls under foot,
the wise man will not therefore be deterred from gathering the pearls that lie
before him. A library of wisdom, then, is more precious than all wealth, and all
things that are desirable cannot be compared to it. Whoever therefore claims to
be zealous of truth, of happiness, of wisdom or knowledge, aye, even of the
faith, must needs become a lover of books.

From what has been said we draw this corollary welcome to us, but (as we
believe) acceptable to few: namely, that no dearness of price ought to hinder a
man from the buying of books, if he has the money that is demanded for them,
unless it be to withstand the malice of the seller or to await a more favourable
opportunity of buying. For if it is wisdom only that makes the price of books,
which is an infinite treasure to mankind, and if the value of books is
unspeakable, as the premises show, how shall the bargain be shown to be dear
where an infinite good is being bought? Wherefore, that books are to be gladly
bought and unwillingly sold, Solomon, the sun of men, exhorts us in the
Proverbs: Buy the truth, he says, and sell not wisdom. But what we are trying to
show by rhetoric or logic, let us prove by examples from history. The
arch-philosopher Aristotle, whom Averroes regards as the law of Nature, bought a
few books of Speusippus straightway after his death for 72,000 sesterces. Plato,
before him in time, but after him in learning, bought the book of Philolaus the
Pythagorean, from which he is said to have taken the Timaeus, for 10,000
denaries, as Aulus Gellius relates in the Noctes Atticae. Now Aulus Gellius
relates this that the foolish may consider how wise men despise money in
comparison with books. And on the other hand, that we may know that folly and
pride go together, let us here relate the folly of Tarquin the Proud in
despising books, as also related by Aulus Gellius. An old woman, utterly
unknown, is said to have come to Tarquin the Proud, the seventh king of Rome,
offering to sell nine books, in which (as she declared) sacred oracles were
contained, but she asked an immense sum for them, insomuch that the king said
she was mad. In anger she flung three books into the fire, and still asked the
same sum for the rest. When the king refused it, again she flung three others
into the fire and still asked the same price for the three that were left. At
last, astonished beyond measure, Tarquin was glad to pay for three books the
same price for which he might have bought nine. The old woman straightway
disappeared, and was never seen before or after. These were the Sibylline books,
which the Romans consulted as a divine oracle by some one of the Quindecemvirs,
and this is believed to have been the origin of the Quindecemvirate. What did
this Sibyl teach the proud king by this bold deed, except that the vessels of
wisdom, holy books, exceed all human estimation; and, as Gregory says of the
kingdom of Heaven: They are worth all that thou hast?

A generation of vipers destroying their own parent and base offspring of the
ungrateful cuckoo, who when he has grown strong slays his nurse, the giver of
his strength, are degenerate clerks with regard to books. Bring it again to mind
and consider faithfully what ye receive through books, and ye will find that
books are as it were the creators of your distinction, without which other
favourers would have been wanting.

In sooth, while still untrained and helpless ye crept up to us, ye spake as
children, ye thought as children, ye cried as children and begged to be made
partakers of our milk. But we being straightway moved by your tears gave you the
breast of grammar to suck, which ye plied continually with teeth and tongue,
until ye lost your native barbarousness and learned to speak with our tongues
the mighty things of God. And next we clad you with the goodly garments of
philosophy, rhetoric and dialectic, of which we had and have a store, while ye
were naked as a tablet to be painted on. For all the household of philosophy are
clothed with garments, that the nakedness and rawness of the intellect may be
covered. After this, providing you with the fourfold wings of the quadrivials
that ye might be winged like the seraphs and so mount above the cherubim, we
sent you to a friend at whose door, if only ye importunately knocked, ye might
borrow the three loaves of the Knowledge of the Trinity, in which consists the
final felicity of every sojourner below. Nay, if ye deny that ye had these
privileges, we boldly declare that ye either lost them by your carelessness, or
that through your sloth ye spurned them when offered to you. If these things
seem but a light matter to you, we will add yet greater things. Ye are a chosen
people, a royal priesthood, a holy race, ye are a peculiar people chosen into
the lot of God, ye are priests and ministers of God, nay, ye are called the very
Church of God, as though the laity were not to be called churchmen. Ye, being
preferred to the laity, sing psalms and hymns in the chancel, and, serving the
altar and living by the altar, make the true body of Christ, wherein God Himself
has honoured you not only above the laity, but even a little higher than the
angels. For to whom of His angels has He said at any time: Thou art a priest for
ever after the order of Melchisedech? Ye dispense the patrimony of the crucified
one to the poor, wherein it is required of stewards that a man be found
faithful. Ye are shepherds of the Lord's flock, as well in example of life as in
the word of doctrine, which is bound to repay you with milk and wool.

Who are the givers of all these things, O clerks? Is it not books? Do ye
remember therefore, we pray, how many and how great liberties and privileges are
bestowed upon the clergy through us? In truth, taught by us who are the vessels
of wisdom and intellect, ye ascend the teacher's chair and are called of men
Rabbi. By us ye become marvellous in the eyes of the laity, like great lights in
the world, and possess the dignities of the Church according to your various
stations. By us, while ye still lack the first down upon your cheeks, ye are
established in your early years and bear the tonsure on your heads, while the
dread sentence of the Church is heard: Touch not mine anointed and do my
prophets no harm, and he who has rashly touched them let him forthwith by his
own blow be smitten violently with the wound of an anathema. At length yielding
your lives to wickedness, reaching the two paths of Pythagoras, ye choose the
left branch, and going backward ye let go the lot of God which ye had first
assumed, becoming companions of thieves. And thus ever going from bad to worse,
dyed with theft and murder and manifold impurities, your fame and conscience
stained by sins, at the bidding of justice ye are confined in manacles and
fetters, and are kept to be punished by a most shameful death. Then your friend
is put far away, nor is there any to mourn your lot. Peter swears that he knows
not the man: the people cry to the judge: Crucify, crucify Him! If thou let this
man go, thou act not Caesar's friend. Now all refuge has perished, for ye must
stand before the judgment-seat, and there is no appeal, but only hanging is in
store for you. While the wretched man's heart is thus filled with woe and only
the sorrowing Muses bedew their cheeks with tears, in his strait is heard on
every side the wailing appeal to us, and to avoid the danger of impending death
he shows the slight sign of the ancient tonsure which we bestowed upon him,
begging that we may be called to his aid and bear witness to the privilege
bestowed upon him. Then straightway touched with pity we run to meet the
prodigal son and snatch the fugitive slave from the gates of death. The book he
has not forgotten is handed to him to be read, and while with lips stammering
with fear he reads a few words, the power of the judge is loosed, the accuser is
withdrawn, and death is put to flight. O marvellous virtue of an empiric verse!
O saving antidote of dreadful ruin! O precious reading of the psalter, which for
this alone deserves to be called the book of life! Let the laity undergo the
judgment of the secular arm, that either sewn up in sacks they may be carried
out to Neptune, or planted in the earth may fructify for Pluto, or may be
offered amid the flames as a fattened holocaust to Vulcan, or at least may be
hung up as a victim to Juno: while our nursling at a single reading of the book
of life is handed over to the custody of the Bishop, and rigour is changed to
favour, and the forum being transferred from the laity, death is routed by the
clerk who is the nursling of books.

But now let us speak of the clerks who are vessels of virtue. Which of you
about to preach ascends the pulpit or the rostrum without in some way consulting
us? Which of you enters the schools to teach or to dispute without relying upon
our support? First of all, it behoves you to eat the book with Ezechiel, that
the belly of your memory may be sweetened within, and thus as with the panther
refreshed, to whose breath all beasts and cattle long to approach, the sweet
savour of the spices it has eaten may shed a perfume without. Thus our nature
secretly working in our own, listeners hasten up gladly, as the load-stone draws
the iron nothing loth. What an infinite host of books lie at Paris or Athens,
and at the same time resound in Britain and in Rome! In truth, while resting
they yet move, and while retaining their own places they are carried about every
way to the minds of listeners. Finally, by the knowledge of literature, we
establish Priests, Bishops, Cardinals, and the Pope, that all things in the
ecclesiastical hierarchy may be fitly disposed. For it is from books that
everything of good that befalls the clerical condition takes its origin. But let
this suffice: for it pains us to recall what we have bestowed upon the
degenerate clergy, because whatever gifts are distributed to the ungrateful seem
to be lost rather than bestowed.

Let us next dwell a little on the recital of the wrongs with which they
requite us, the contempts and cruelties of which we cannot recite an example in
each kind, nay, scarcely the main classes of the several wrongs. In the first
place, we are expelled by force and arms from the homes of the clergy, which are
ours by hereditary right, who were used to have cells of quietness in the inner
chamber, but, alas! in these unhappy times we are altogether exiled, suffering
poverty without the gates. For our places are seized now by dogs, now by hawks,
now by that biped beast whose cohabitation with the clergy was forbidden of old,
from which we have always taught our nurslings to flee more than from the asp
and the cockatrice; wherefore she, always jealous of the love of us, and never
to be appeased, at length seeing us in some corner protected only by the web of
some dead spider, with a frown abuses and reviles us with bitter words,
declaring us alone of all the furniture in the house to be unnecessary, and
complaining that we are useless for any household purpose, and advises that we
should speedily be converted into rich caps, sendal and silk and twice-dyed
purple, robes and furs, wool and linen: and, indeed, not without reason, if she
could see our inmost hearts, if she had listened to our secret counsels, if she
had read the book of Theophrastus or Valerius, or only heard the twenty-fifth
chapter of Ecclesiasticus with understanding ears.

And hence it is that we have to mourn for the homes of which we have been
unjustly robbed; and as to our coverings, not that they have not been given to
us, but that the coverings anciently given to us have been torn by violent
hands, insomuch that our soul is bowed down to the dust, our belly cleaveth unto
the earth. We suffer from various diseases, enduring pains in our backs and
sides; we lie with our limbs unstrung by palsy, and there is no man who layeth
it to heart, and no man who provides a mollifying plaster. Our native whiteness
that was clear with light has turned to dun and yellow, so that no leech who
should see us would doubt that we are diseased with jaundice. Some of us are
suffering from gout, as our twisted extremities plainly show. The smoke and dust
by which we are continuously plagued have dulled the keenness of our visual
rays, and are now infecting our bleared eyes with ophthalmia. Within we are
devoured by the fierce gripings of our entrails, which hungry worms cease not to
gnaw, and we undergo the corruption of the two Lazaruses, nor is there anyone to
anoint us with balm of cedar, nor to cry to us who have been four days dead and
already stink, Lazarus come forth! No healing drug is bound around our cruel
wounds, which are so atrociously inflicted upon the innocent, and there is none
to put a plaster upon our ulcers; but ragged and shivering we are flung away
into dark corners, or in tears take our place with holy Job upon his dunghill,
or--too horrible to relate--are buried in the depths of the common sewers. The
cushion is withdrawn that should support our evangelical sides, which ought to
have the first claim upon the incomes of the clergy, and the common necessaries
of life thus be for ever provided for us, who are entrusted to their charge.

Again, we complain of another sort of injury which is too often unjustly
inflicted upon our persons. We are sold for bondmen and bondwomen, and lie as
hostages in taverns with no one to redeem us. We fall a prey to the cruel
shambles, where we see sheep and cattle slaughtered not without pious tears, and
where we die a thousand times from such terrors as might frighten even the
brave. We are handed over to Jews, Saracens, heretics and infidels, whose poison
we always dread above everything, and by whom it is well known that some of our
parents have been infected with pestiferous venom. In sooth, we who should be
treated as masters in the sciences, and bear rule over the mechanics who should
be subject to us, are instead handed over to the government of subordinates, as
though some supremely noble monarch should be trodden under foot by rustic
heels. Any seamster or cobbler or tailor or artificer of any trade keeps us shut
up in prison for the luxurious and wanton pleasures of the clergy.

Now we would pursue a new kind of injury by which we suffer alike in person
and in fame, the dearest thing we have. Our purity of race is diminished every
day, while new authors' names are imposed upon us by worthless compilers,
translators, and transformers, and losing our ancient nobility, while we are
reborn in successive generations, we become wholly degenerate; and thus against
our will the name of some wretched stepfather is affixed to us, and the sons are
robbed of the names of their true fathers. The verses of Virgil, while he was
yet living, were claimed by an impostor; and a certain Fidentinus mendaciously
usurped the works of Martial, whom Martial thus deservedly rebuked:

"The book you read is, Fidentinus! mine, Though read so badly, 't well
may pass for thine!"

What marvel, then, if when our authors are dead clerical apes use us to make
broad their phylacteries, since even while they are alive they try to seize us
as soon as we are published? Ah! how often ye pretend that we who are ancient
are but lately born, and try to pass us off as sons who are really fathers,
calling us who have made you clerks the production of your studies. Indeed, we
derived our origin from Athens, though we are now supposed to be from Rome; for
Carmentis was always the pilferer of Cadmus, and we who were but lately born in
England, will to-morrow be born again in Paris; and thence being carried to
Bologna, will obtain an Italian origin, based upon no affinity of blood. Alas!
how ye commit us to treacherous copyists to be written, how corruptly ye read us
and kill us by medication, while ye supposed ye were correcting us with pious
zeal. Oftentimes we have to endure barbarous interpreters, and those who are
ignorant of foreign idioms presume to translate us from one language into
another; and thus all propriety of speech is lost and our sense is shamefully
mutilated contrary to the meaning of the author! Truly noble would have been the
condition of books if it had not been for the presumption of the tower of Babel,
if but one kind of speech had been transmitted by the whole human race.

We will add the last clause of our long lament, though far too short for the
materials that we have. For in us the natural use is changed to that which is
against nature, while we who are the light of faithful souls everywhere fall a
prey to painters knowing nought of letters, and are entrusted to goldsmiths to
become, as though we were not sacred vessels of wisdom, repositories of
gold-leaf. We fall undeservedly into the power of laymen, which is more bitter
to us than any death, since they have sold our people for nought, and our
enemies themselves are our judges.

It is clear from what we have said what infinite invectives we could hurl
against the clergy, if we did not think of our own reputation. For the soldier
whose campaigns are over venerates his shield and arms, and grateful Corydon
shows regard for his decaying team, harrow, flail and mattock, and every manual
artificer for the instruments of his craft; it is only the ungrateful cleric who
despises and neglects those things which have ever been the foundation of his
honours.

The venerable devotion of the religious orders is wont to be solicitous in
the care of books and to delight in their society, as if they were the only
riches. For some used to write them with their own hands between the hours of
prayer, and gave to the making of books such intervals as they could secure and
the times appointed for the recreation of the body. By whose labours there are
resplendent to-day in most monasteries these sacred treasuries full of cherubic
letters, for giving the knowledge of salvation to the student and a delectable
light to the paths of the laity. O manual toil, happier than any agricultural
task! O devout solicitude, where neither Martha nor Mary deserves to be rebuked!
O joyful house, in which the fruitful Leah does not envy the beauteous Rachel,
but action and contemplation share each other's joys! O happy charge, destined
to benefit endless generations of posterity, with which no planting of trees, no
sowing of seeds, no pastoral delight in herds, no building of fortified camps
can be compared! Wherefore the memory of those fathers should be immortal, who
delighted only in the treasures of wisdom, who most laboriously provided shining
lamps against future darkness, and against hunger of hearing the Word of God,
most carefully prepared, not bread baked in the ashes, nor of barley, nor musty,
but unleavened loaves made of the finest wheat of divine wisdom, with which
hungry souls might be joyfully fed These men were the stoutest champions of the
Christian army, who defended our weakness by their most valiant arms; they were
in their time the most cunning takers of foxes, who have left us their nets,
that we might catch the young foxes, who cease not to devour the growing vines.
Of a truth, noble fathers, worthy of perpetual benediction, ye would have been
deservedly happy, if ye had been allowed to beget offspring like yourselves, and
to leave no degenerate or doubtful progeny for the benefit of future times.

But, painful to relate, now slothful Thersites handles the arms of Achilles
and the choice trappings of war-horses are spread upon lazy asses, winking owls
lord it in the eagle's nest, and the cowardly kite sits upon the perch of the
hawk.

Liber Bacchus is ever loved, And is into their bellies shoved, By day and by
night; Liber Codex is neglected, And with scornful hand rejected Far out of
their sight.

And as if the simple monastic folk of modern times were deceived by a
confusion of names, while Liber Pater is preferred to Liber Patrum, the study of
the monks nowadays is in the emptying of cups and not the emending of books; to
which they do not hesitate to add the wanton music of Timotheus, jealous of
chastity, and thus the song of the merry-maker and not the chant of the mourner
is become the office of the monks. Flocks and fleeces, crops and granaries,
leeks and potherbs, drink and goblets, are nowadays the reading and study of the
monks, except a few elect ones, in whom lingers not the image but some slight
vestige of the fathers that preceded them. And again, no materials at all are
furnished us to commend the canons regular for their care or study of us, who
though they bear their name of honour from their twofold rule, yet have
neglected the notable clause of Augustine's rule, in which we are commended to
his clergy in these words: Let books be asked for each day at a given hour; he
who asks for them after the hour is not to receive them. Scarcely anyone
observes this devout rule of study after saying the prayers of the Church, but
to care for the things of this world and to look at the plough that has been
left is reckoned the highest wisdom. They take up bow and quiver, embrace arms
and shield, devote the tribute of alms to dogs and not to the poor, become the
slaves of dice and draughts, and of all such things as we are wont to forbid
even to the secular clergy, so that we need not marvel if they disdain to look
upon us, whom they see so much opposed to their mode of life.

Come then, reverend fathers, deign to recall your fathers and devote
yourselves more faithfully to the study of holy books, without which all
religion will stagger, without which the virtue of devotion will dry up like a
sherd, and without which ye can afford no light to the world.

Poor in spirit, but most rich in faith, off-scourings of the world and salt
of the earth, despisers of the world and fishers of men, how happy are ye, if
suffering penury for Christ ye know how to possess your souls in patience! For
it is not want the avenger of iniquity, nor the adverse fortune of your parents,
nor violent necessity that has thus oppressed you with beggary, but a devout
will and Christ-like election, by which ye have chosen that life as the best,
which God Almighty made man as well by word as by example declared to be the
best. In truth, ye are the latest offspring of the ever-fruitful Church, of late
divinely substituted for the Fathers and the Prophets, that your sound may go
forth into all the earth, and that instructed by our healthful doctrines ye may
preach before all kings and nations the invincible faith of Christ. Moreover,
that the faith of the Fathers is chiefly enshrined in books the second chapter
has sufficiently shown, from which it is clearer than light that ye ought to be
zealous lovers of books above all other Christians. Ye are commanded to sow upon
all waters, because the Most High is no respecter of persons, nor does the Most
Holy desire the death of sinners, who offered Himself to die for them, but
desires to heal the contrite in heart, to raise the fallen, and to correct the
perverse in the spirit of lenity. For which most salutary purpose our kindly
Mother Church has planted you freely, and having planted has watered you with
favours, and having watered you has established you with privileges, that ye may
be co-workers with pastors and curates in procuring the salvation of faithful
souls. Wherefore, that the order of Preachers was principally instituted for the
study of the Holy Scriptures and the salvation of their neighbours, is declared
by their constitutions, so that not only from the rule of Bishop Augustine,
which directs books to be asked for every day, but as soon as they have read the
prologue of the said constitutions they may know from the very title of the same
that they are pledged to the love of books.

But alas! a threefold care of superfluities, viz., of the stomach, of dress,
and of houses, has seduced these men and others following their example from the
paternal care of books, and from their study. For, forgetting the providence of
the Saviour (who is declared by the Psalmist to think upon the poor and needy),
they are occupied with the wants of the perishing body, that their feasts may be
splendid and their garments luxurious, against the rule, and the fabrics of
their buildings, like the battlements of castles, carried to a height
incompatible with poverty. Because of these three things, we books, who have
ever procured their advancement and have granted them to sit among the powerful
and noble, are put far from their heart's affection and are reckoned as
superfluities; except that they rely upon some treatises of small value, from
which they derive strange heresies and apocryphal imbecilities, not for the
refreshment of souls, but rather for tickling the ears of the listeners. The
Holy Scripture is not expounded, but is neglected and treated as though it were
commonplace and known to all, though very few have touched its hem, and though
its depth is such, as Holy Augustine declares, that it cannot be understood by
the human intellect, however long it may toil with the utmost intensity of
study. From this he who devotes himself to it assiduously, if only He will
vouchsafe to open the door who has established the spirit of piety, may unfold a
thousand lessons of moral teaching, which will flourish with the freshest
novelty and will cherish the intelligence of the listeners with the most
delightful savours. Wherefore the first professors of evangelical poverty, after
some slight homage paid to secular science, collecting all their force of
intellect, devoted themselves to labours upon the sacred scripture, meditating
day and night on the law of the Lord. And whatever they could steal from their
famishing belly, or intercept from their half-covered body, they thought it the
highest gain to spend in buying or correcting books. Whose worldly
contemporaries observing their devotion and study bestowed upon them for the
edification of the whole Church the books which they had collected at great
expense in the various parts of the world.

In truth, in these days as ye are engaged with all diligence in pursuit of
gain, it may be reasonably believed, if we speak according to human notions,
that God thinks less upon those whom He perceives to distrust His promises,
putting their hope in human providence, not considering the raven, nor the
lilies, whom the Most High feeds and arrays. Ye do not think upon Daniel and the
bearer of the mess of boiled pottage, nor recollect Elijah who was delivered
from hunger once in the desert by angels, again in the torrent by ravens, and
again in Sarepta by the widow, through the divine bounty, which gives to all
flesh their meat in due season. Ye descend (as we fear) by a wretched
anticlimax, distrust of the divine goodness producing reliance upon your own
prudence, and reliance upon your own prudence begetting anxiety about worldly
things, and excessive anxiety about worldly things taking away the love as well
as the study of books; and thus poverty in these days is abused to the injury of
the Word of God, which ye have chosen only for profit's sake.

With summer fruit, as the people gossip, ye attract boys to religion, whom
when they have taken the vows ye do not instruct by fear and force, as their age
requires, but allow them to devote themselves to begging expeditions, and suffer
them to spend the time, in which they might be learning, in procuring the favour
of friends, to the annoyance of their parents, the danger of the boys, and the
detriment of the order. And thus no doubt it happens that those who were not
compelled to learn as unwilling boys, when they grow up presume to teach though
utterly unworthy and unlearned, and a small error in the beginning becomes a
very great one in the end. For there grows up among your promiscuous flock of
laity a pestilent multitude of creatures, who nevertheless the more shamelessly
force themselves into the office of preaching, the less they understand what
they are saying, to the contempt of the Divine Word and the injury of souls. In
truth, against the law ye plough with an ox and an ass together, in committing
the cultivation of the Lord's field to learned and unlearned. Side by side, it
is written, the oxen were ploughing and the asses feeding beside them: since it
is the duty of the discreet to preach, but of the simple to feed themselves in
silence by the hearing of sacred eloquence. How many stones ye fling upon the
heap of Mercury nowadays! How many marriages ye procure for the eunuchs of
wisdom! How many blind watchmen ye bid go round about the walls of the Church!

O idle fishermen, using only the nets of others, which when torn it is all ye
can do to clumsily repair, but can net no new ones of your own! ye enter on the
labours of others, ye repeat the lessons of others, ye mouth with theatric
effort the superficially repeated wisdom of others. As the silly parrot imitates
the words that he has heard, so such men are mere reciters of all, but authors
of nothing, imitating Balaam's ass, which, though senseless of itself, yet
became eloquent of speech and the teacher of its master though a prophet.
Recover yourselves, O poor in Christ, and studiously regard us books, without
which ye can never be properly shod in the preparation of the Gospel of Peace.

Paul the Apostle, preacher of the truth and excellent teacher of the nations,
for all his gear bade three things to be brought to him by Timothy, his cloak,
books and parchments, affording an example to ecclesiastics that they should
wear dress in moderation, and should have books for aid in study, and
parchments, which the Apostle especially esteems, for writing: AND ESPECIALLY,
he says, the parchments. And truly that clerk is crippled and maimed to his
disablement in many ways, who is entirely ignorant of the art of writing. He
beats the air with words and edifies only those who are present, but does
nothing for the absent and for posterity. The man bore a writer's ink-horn upon
his loins, who set a mark Tau upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and cry,
Ezechiel ix.; teaching in a figure that if any lack skill in writing, he shall
not undertake the task of preaching repentance.

Finally, in conclusion of the present chapter, books implore of you: make
your young men who though ignorant are apt of intellect apply themselves to
study, furnishing them with necessaries, that ye may teach them not only
goodness but discipline and science, may terrify them by blows, charm them by
blandishments, mollify them by gifts, and urge them on by painful rigour, so
that they may become at once Socratics in morals and Peripatetics in learning.
Yesterday, as it were at the eleventh hour, the prudent householder introduced
you into his vineyard. Repent of idleness before it is too late: would that with
the cunning steward ye might be ashamed of begging so shamelessly; for then no
doubt ye would devote yourselves more assiduously to us books and to study.

Almighty Author and Lover of peace, scatter the nations that delight in war,
which is above all plagues injurious to books. For wars being without the
control of reason make a wild assault on everything they come across, and,
lacking the check of reason they push on without discretion or distinction to
destroy the vessels of reason. Then the wise Apollo becomes the Python's prey,
and Phronesis, the pious mother, becomes subject to the power of Phrenzy. Then
winged Pegasus is shut up in the stall of Corydon, and eloquent Mercury is
strangled. Then wise Pallas is struck down by the dagger of error, and the
charming Pierides are smitten by the truculent tyranny of madness. O cruel
spectacle! where you may see the Phoebus of philosophers, the all-wise
Aristotle, whom God Himself made master of the master of the world, enchained by
wicked hands and borne in shameful irons on the shoulders of gladiators from his
sacred home. There you may see him who was worthy to be lawgiver to the lawgiver
of the world and to hold empire over its emperor, made the slave of vile
buffoons by the most unrighteous laws of war. O most wicked power of darkness,
which does not fear to undo the approved divinity of Plato, who alone was worthy
to submit to the view of the Creator, before he assuaged the strife of warring
chaos, and before form had put on its garb of matter, the ideal types, in order
to demonstrate the archetypal universe to its author, so that the world of sense
might be modelled after the supernal pattern. O tearful sight! where the moral
Socrates, whose acts were virtue and whose discourse was science, who deduced
political justice from the principles of nature, is seen enslaved to some rascal
robber. We bemoan Pythagoras, the parent of harmony, as, brutally scourged by
the harrying furies of war, he utters not a song but the wailings of a dove. We
mourn, too, for Zeno, who lest he should betray his secret bit off his tongue
and fearlessly spat it out at the tyrant, and now, alas! is brayed and crushed
to death in a mortar by Diomedon.

In sooth we cannot mourn with the grief that they deserve all the various
books that have perished by the fate of war in various parts of the world. Yet
we must tearfully recount the dreadful ruin which was caused in Egypt by the
auxiliaries in the Alexandrian war, when seven hundred thousand volumes were
consumed by fire. These volumes had been collected by the royal Ptolemies
through long periods of time, as Aulus Gellius relates. What an Atlantean
progeny must be supposed to have then perished: including the motions of the
spheres, all the conjunctions of the planets, the nature of the galaxy, and the
prognostic generations of comets, and all that exists in the heavens or in the
ether! Who would not shudder at such a hapless holocaust, where ink is offered
up instead of blood, where the glowing ashes of crackling parchment were
encarnadined with blood, where the devouring flames consumed so many thousands
of innocents in whose mouth was no guile, where the unsparing fire turned into
stinking ashes so many shrines of eternal truth! A lesser crime than this is the
sacrifice of Jephthah or Agamemnon, where a pious daughter is slain by a
father's sword. How many labours of the famous Hercules shall we suppose then
perished, who because of his knowledge of astronomy is said to have sustained
the heaven on his unyielding neck, when Hercules was now for the second time
cast into the flames. The secrets of the heavens, which Jonithus learnt not from
man or through man but received by divine inspiration; what his brother
Zoroaster, the servant of unclean spirits, taught the Bactrians; what holy
Enoch, the prefect of Paradise, prophesied before he was taken from the world,
and finally, what the first Adam taught his children of the things to come,
which he had seen when caught up in an ecstasy in the book of eternity, are
believed to have perished in those horrid flames. The religion of the Egyptians,
which the book of the Perfect Word so commends; the excellent polity of the
older Athens, which preceded by nine thousand years the Athens of Greece; the
charms of the Chaldaeans; the observations of the Arabs and Indians; the
ceremonies of the Jews; the architecture of the Babylonians; the agriculture of
Noah the magic arts of Moses; the geometry of Joshua; the enigmas of Samson; the
problems of Solomon from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop; the antidotes of
Aesculapius; the grammar of Cadmus; the poems of Parnassus; the oracles of
Apollo; the argonautics of Jason; the stratagems of Palamedes, and infinite
other secrets of science are believed to have perished at the time of this
conflagration.

Nay, Aristotle would not have missed the quadrature of the circle, if only
baleful conflicts had spared the books of the ancients, who knew all the methods
of nature. He would not have left the problem of the eternity of the world an
open question, nor, as is credibly conceived, would he have had any doubts of
the plurality of human intellects and of their eternity, if the perfect sciences
of the ancients had not been exposed to the calamities of hateful wars. For by
wars we are scattered into foreign lands, are mutilated, wounded, and shamefully
disfigured, are buried under the earth and overwhelmed in the sea, are devoured
by the flames and destroyed by every kind of death. How much of our blood was
shed by warlike Scipio, when he was eagerly compassing the overthrow of
Carthage, the opponent and rival of the Roman empire! How many thousands of
thousands of us did the ten years' war of Troy dismiss from the light of day!
How many were driven by Anthony, after the murder of Tully, to seek hiding
places in foreign provinces! How many of us were scattered by Theodoric, while
Boethius was in exile, into the different quarters of the world, like sheep
whose shepherd has been struck down! How many, when Seneca fell a victim to the
cruelty of Nero, and willing yet unwilling passed the gates of death, took leave
of him and retired in tears, not even knowing in what quarter to seek for
shelter!

Happy was that translation of books which Xerxes is said to have made to
Persia from Athens, and which Seleucus brought back again from Persia to Athens.
O glad and joyful return! O wondrous joy, which you might then see in Athens,
when the mother went in triumph to meet her progeny, and again showed the
chambers in which they had been nursed to her now aging children! Their old
homes were restored to their former inmates, and forthwith boards of cedar with
shelves and beams of gopher wood are most skilfully planed; inscriptions of gold
and ivory are designed for the several compartments, to which the volumes
themselves are reverently brought and pleasantly arranged, so that no one
hinders the entrance of another or injures its brother by excessive crowding.

But in truth infinite are the losses which have been inflicted upon the race
of books by wars and tumults. And as it is by no means possible to enumerate and
survey infinity, we will here finally set up the Gades of our complaint, and
turn again to the prayers with which we began, humbly imploring that the Ruler
of Olympus and the Most High Governor of all the world will establish peace and
dispel wars and make our days tranquil under His protection.

OF THE NUMEROUS OPPORTUNITIES WE HAVE HAD OF COLLECTING
A STORE OF BOOKS

Since to everything there is a season and an opportunity, as the wise
Ecclesiastes witnesseth, let us now proceed to relate the manifold opportunities
through which we have been assisted by the divine goodness in the acquisition of
books.

Although from our youth upwards we had always delighted in holding social
commune with learned men and lovers of books, yet when we prospered in the world
and made acquaintance with the King's majesty and were received into his
household, we obtained ampler facilities for visiting everywhere as we would,
and of hunting as it were certain most choice preserves, libraries private as
well as public, and of the regular as well as of the secular clergy. And indeed
while we filled various offices to the victorious Prince and splendidly
triumphant King of England, Edward the Third from the Conquest--whose reign may
the Almighty long and peacefully continue--first those about his court, but then
those concerning the public affairs of his kingdom, namely the offices of
Chancellor and Treasurer, there was afforded to us, in consideration of the
royal favour, easy access for the purpose of freely searching the retreats of
books. In fact, the fame of our love of them had been soon winged abroad
everywhere, and we were reported to burn with such desire for books, and
especially old ones, that it was more easy for any man to gain our favour by
means of books than of money. Wherefore, since supported by the goodness of the
aforesaid prince of worthy memory, we were able to requite a man well or ill, to
benefit or injure mightily great as well as small, there flowed in, instead of
presents and guerdons, and instead of gifts and jewels, soiled tracts and
battered codices, gladsome alike to our eye and heart. Then the aumbries of the
most famous monasteries were thrown open, cases were unlocked and caskets were
undone, and volumes that had slumbered through long ages in their tombs wake up
and are astonished, and those that had lain hidden in dark places are bathed in
the ray of unwonted light. These long lifeless books, once most dainty, but now
become corrupt and loathsome, covered with litters of mice and pierced with the
gnawings of the worms, and who were once clothed in purple and fine linen, now
lying in sackcloth and ashes, given up to oblivion, seemed to have become
habitations of the moth. Natheless among these, seizing the opportunity, we
would sit down with more delight than a fastidious physician among his stores of
gums and spices, and there we found the object and the stimulus of our
affections. Thus the sacred vessels of learning came into our control and
stewardship; some by gift, others by purchase, and some lent to us for a season.

No wonder that when people saw that we were contented with gifts of this
kind, they were anxious of their own accord to minister to our needs with those
things that they were more willing to dispense with than the things they secured
by ministering to our service. And in good will we strove so to forward their
affairs that gain accrued to them, while justice suffered no disparagement.
Indeed, if we had loved gold and silver goblets, high-bred horses, or no small
sums of money, we might in those days have furnished forth a rich treasury. But
in truth we wanted manuscripts not moneyscripts; we loved codices more than
florins, and preferred slender pamphlets to pampered palfreys.

Besides all this, we were frequently made ambassador of this most illustrious
Prince of everlasting memory, and were sent on the most various affairs of
state, now to the Holy See, now to the Court of France, and again to various
powers of the world, on tedious embassies and in times of danger, always
carrying with us, however, that love of books which many waters could not
quench. For this like a delicious draught sweetened the bitterness of our
journeyings and after the perplexing intricacies and troublesome difficulties of
causes, and the all but inextricable labyrinths of public affairs afforded us a
little breathing space to enjoy a balmier atmosphere.

O Holy God of gods in Sion, what a mighty stream of pleasure made glad our
hearts whenever we had leisure to visit Paris, the Paradise of the world, and to
linger there; where the days seemed ever few for the greatness of our love!
There are delightful libraries, more aromatic than stores of spicery; there are
luxuriant parks of all manner of volumes; there are Academic meads shaken by the
tramp of scholars; there are lounges of Athens; walks of the Peripatetics; peaks
of Parnassus; and porches of the Stoics. There is seen the surveyor of all arts
and sciences Aristotle, to whom belongs all that is most excellent in doctrine,
so far as relates to this passing sublunary world; there Ptolemy measures
epicycles and eccentric apogees and the nodes of the planets by figures and
numbers; there Paul reveals the mysteries; there his neighbour Dionysius
arranges and distinguishes the hierarchies; there the virgin Carmentis
reproduces in Latin characters all that Cadmus collected in Phoenician letters;
there indeed opening our treasuries and unfastening our purse-strings we
scattered money with joyous heart and purchased inestimable books with mud and
sand. It is naught, it is naught, saith every buyer. But in vain; for behold how
good and how pleasant it is to gather together the arms of the clerical warfare,
that we may have the means to crush the attacks of heretics, if they arise.

Further, we are aware that we obtained most excellent opportunities of
collecting in the following way. From our early years we attached to our society
with the most exquisite solicitude and discarding all partiality all such
masters and scholars and professors in the several faculties as had become most
distinguished by their subtlety of mind and the fame of their learning. Deriving
consolation from their sympathetic conversation, we were delightfully
entertained, now by demonstrative chains of reasoning, now by the recital of
physical processes and the treatises of the doctors of the Church, now by
stimulating discourses on the allegorical meanings of things, as by a rich and
well-varied intellectual feast. Such men we chose as comrades in our years of
learning, as companions in our chamber, as associates on our journeys, as guests
at our table, and, in short, as helpmates in all the vicissitudes of life. But
as no happiness is permitted to endure for long, we were sometimes deprived of
the bodily companionship of some of these shining lights, when justice looking
down from heaven, the ecclesiastical preferments and dignities that they
deserved fell to their portion. And thus it happened, as was only right, that in
attending to their own cures they were obliged to absent themselves from
attendance upon us.

We will add yet another very convenient way by which a great multitude of
books old as well as new came into our hands. For we never regarded with disdain
or disgust the poverty of the mendicant orders, adopted for the sake of Christ;
but in all parts of the world took them into the kindly arms of our compassion,
allured them by the most friendly familiarity into devotion to ourselves, and
having so allured them cherished them with munificent liberality of beneficence
for the sake of God, becoming benefactors of all of them in general in such wise
that we seemed none the less to have adopted certain individuals with a special
fatherly affection. To these men we were as a refuge in every case of need, and
never refused to them the shelter of our favour, wherefore we deserved to find
them most special furtherers of our wishes and promoters thereof in act and
deed, who compassing land and sea, traversing the circuit of the world, and
ransacking the universities and high schools of various provinces, were zealous
in combatting for our desires, in the sure and certain hope of reward. What
leveret could escape amidst so many keen-sighted hunters? What little fish could
evade in turn their hooks and nets and snares? From the body of the Sacred Law
down to the booklet containing the fallacies of yesterday, nothing could escape
these searchers. Was some devout discourse uttered at the fountain-head of
Christian faith, the holy Roman Curia, or was some strange question ventilated
with novel arguments; did the solidity of Paris, which is now more zealous in
the study of antiquity than in the subtle investigation of truth, did English
subtlety, which illumined by the lights of former times is always sending forth
fresh rays of truth, produce anything to the advancement of science or the
declaration of the faith, this was instantly poured still fresh into our ears,
ungarbled by any babbler, unmutilated by any trifler, but passing straight from
the purest of wine-presses into the vats of our memory to be clarified.

But whenever it happened that we turned aside to the cities and places where
the mendicants we have mentioned had their convents, we did not disdain to visit
their libraries and any other repositories of books; nay, there we found heaped
up amid the utmost poverty the utmost riches of wisdom. We discovered in their
fardels and baskets not only crumbs falling from the masters' table for the
dogs, but the shewbread without leaven and the bread of angels having in it all
that is delicious; and indeed the garners of Joseph full of corn, and all the
spoil of the Egyptians, and the very precious gifts which Queen Sheba brought to
Solomon.

These men are as ants ever preparing their meat in the summer, and ingenious
bees continually fabricating cells of honey. They are successors of Bezaleel in
devising all manner of workmanship in silver and gold and precious stones for
decorating the temple of the Church. They are cunning embroiderers, who fashion
the breastplate and ephod of the high priest and all the various vestments of
the priests. They fashion the curtains of linen and hair and coverings of ram's
skins dyed red with which to adorn the tabernacle of the Church militant. They
are husbandmen that sow, oxen treading out corn, sounding trumpets, shining
Pleiades and stars remaining in their courses, which cease not to fight against
Sisera. And to pay due regard to truth, without prejudice to the judgment of
any, although they lately at the eleventh hour have entered the lord's vineyard,
as the books that are so fond of us eagerly declared in our sixth chapter, they
have added more in this brief hour to the stock of the sacred books than all the
other vine-dressers; following in the footsteps of Paul, the last to be called
but the first in preaching, who spread the gospel of Christ more widely than all
others. Of these men, when we were raised to the episcopate we had several of
both orders, viz., the Preachers and Minors, as personal attendants and
companions at our board, men distinguished no less in letters than in morals,
who devoted themselves with unwearied zeal to the correction, exposition,
tabulation, and compilation of various volumes. But although we have acquired a
very numerous store of ancient as well as modern works by the manifold
intermediation of the religious, yet we must laud the Preachers with special
praise, in that we have found them above all the religious most freely
communicative of their stores without jealousy, and proved them to be imbued
with an almost Divine liberality, not greedy but fitting possessors of luminous
wisdom.

Besides all the opportunities mentioned above, we secured the acquaintance of
stationers and booksellers, not only within our own country, but of those spread
over the realms of France, Germany, and Italy, money flying forth in abundance
to anticipate their demands; nor were they hindered by any distance or by the
fury of the seas, or by the lack of means for their expenses, from sending or
bringing to us the books that we required. For they well knew that their
expectations of our bounty would not be defrauded, but that ample repayment with
usury was to be found with us.

Nor, finally, did our good fellowship, which aimed to captivate the affection
of all, overlook the rectors of schools and the instructors of rude boys. But
rather, when we had an opportunity, we entered their little plots and gardens
and gathered sweet-smelling flowers from the surface and dug up their roots,
obsolete indeed, but still useful to the student, which might, when their rank
barbarism was digested heal the pectoral arteries with the gift of eloquence.
Amongst the mass of these things we found some greatly meriting to be restored,
which when skilfully cleansed and freed from the disfiguring rust of age,
deserved to be renovated into comeliness of aspect. And applying in full measure
the necessary means, as a type of the resurrection to come, we resuscitated them
and restored them again to new life and health.

Moreover, we had always in our different manors no small multitude of
copyists and scribes, of binders, correctors, illuminators, and generally of all
who could usefully labour in the service of books. Finally, all of both sexes
and of every rank or position who had any kind of association with books, could
most easily open by their knocking the door of our heart, and find a fit
resting-place in our affection and favour. In so much did we receive those who
brought books, that the multitude of those who had preceded them did not lessen
the welcome of the after-comers, nor were the favours we had awarded yesterday
prejudicial to those of to-day. Wherefore, ever using all the persons we have
named as a kind of magnets to attract books, we had the desired accession of the
vessels of science and a multitudinous flight of the finest volumes.

HOW, ALTHOUGH WE PREFERRED THE WORKS OF THE ANCIENTS,
WE HAVE NOT CONDEMNED THE STUDIES OF THE MODERNS

Although the novelties of the moderns were never disagreeable to our desires,
who have always cherished with grateful affection those who devote themselves to
study and who add anything either ingenious or useful to the opinions of our
forefathers, yet we have always desired with more undoubting avidity to
investigate the well-tested labours of the ancients. For whether they had by
nature a greater vigour of mental sagacity, or whether they perhaps indulged in
closer application to study, or whether they were assisted in their progress by
both these things, one thing we are perfectly clear about, that their successors
are barely capable of discussing the discoveries of their forerunners, and of
acquiring those things as pupils which the ancients dug out by difficult efforts
of discovery. For as we read that the men of old were of a more excellent degree
of bodily development than modern times are found to produce, it is by no means
absurd to suppose that most of the ancients were distinguished by brighter
faculties, seeing that in the labours they accomplished of both kinds they are
inimitable by posterity. And so Phocas writes in the prologue to his Grammar:

Since all things have been said by men of sense The only novelty is--to
condense.

But in truth, if we speak of fervour of learning and diligence in study, they
gave up all their lives to philosophy; while nowadays our contemporaries
carelessly spend a few years of hot youth, alternating with the excesses of
vice, and when the passions have been calmed, and they have attained the
capacity of discerning truth so difficult to discover, they soon become involved
in worldly affairs and retire, bidding farewell to the schools of philosophy.
They offer the fuming must of their youthful intellect to the difficulties of
philosophy, and bestow the clearer wine upon the money-making business of life.
Further, as Ovid in the first book of the De Vetula justly complains:

The hearts of all men after gold aspire; Few study to be wise, more to
acquire: Thus, Science! all thy virgin charms are sold, Whose chaste embraces
should disdain their gold, Who seek not thee thyself, but pelf through thee,
Longing for riches, not philosophy.

And further on:

Thus Philosophy is seen Exiled, and Philopecuny is queen,

which is known to be the most violent poison of learning.

How the ancients indeed regarded life as the only limit of study, is shown by
Valerius, in his book addressed to Tiberius, by many examples. Carneades, he
says, was a laborious and lifelong soldier of wisdom: after he had lived ninety
years, the same day put an end to his life and his philosophizing. Isocrates in
his ninety-fourth year wrote a most noble work. Sophocles did the same when
nearly a hundred years old. Simonides wrote poems in his eightieth year. Aulus
Gellius did not desire to live longer than he should be able to write, as he
says himself in the prologue to the Noctes Atticae.

The fervour of study which possessed Euclid the Socratic, Taurus the
philosopher used to relate to incite young men to study, as Gellius tells in the
book we have mentioned. For the Athenians, hating the people of Megara, decreed
that if any of the Megarensians entered Athens, he should be put to death. Then
Euclid, who was a Megarensian, and had attended the lectures of Socrates before
this decree, disguising himself in a woman's dress, used to go from Megara to
Athens by night to hear Socrates, a distance of twenty miles and back. Imprudent
and excessive was the fervour of Archimedes, a lover of geometry, who would not
declare his name, nor lift his head from the diagram he had drawn, by which he
might have prolonged his life, but thinking more of study than of life dyed with
his life-blood the figure he was studying.

There are very many such examples of our proposition, but the brevity we aim
at does not allow us to recall them. But, painful to relate, the clerks who are
famous in these days pursue a very different course. Afflicted with ambition in
their tender years, and slightly fastening to their untried arms the Icarian
wings of presumption, they prematurely snatch the master's cap; and mere boys
become unworthy professors of the several faculties, through which they do not
make their way step by step, but like goats ascend by leaps and bounds; and,
having slightly tasted of the mighty stream, they think that they have drunk it
dry, though their throats are hardly moistened. And because they are not
grounded in the first rudiments at the fitting time, they build a tottering
edifice on an unstable foundation, and now that they have grown up, they are
ashamed to learn what they ought to have learned while young, and thus they are
compelled to suffer for ever for too hastily jumping at dignities they have not
deserved. For these and the like reasons the tyros in the schools do not attain
to the solid learning of the ancients in a few short hours of study, although
they may enjoy distinctions, may be accorded titles, be authorized by official
robes, and solemnly installed in the chairs of the elders. Just snatched from
the cradle and hastily weaned, they mouth the rules of Priscian and Donatus;
while still beardless boys they gabble with childish stammering the Categorics
and Peri Hermeneias, in the writing of which the great Aristotle is said to have
dipped his pen in his heart's blood. Passing through these faculties with
baneful haste and a harmful diploma, they lay violent hands upon Moses, and
sprinkling about their faces dark waters and thick clouds of the skies, they
offer their heads, unhonoured by the snows of age, for the mitre of the
pontificate. This pest is greatly encouraged, and they are helped to attain this
fantastic clericate with such nimble steps, by Papal provisions obtained by
insidious prayers, and also by the prayers, which may not be rejected, of
cardinals and great men, by the cupidity of friends and relatives, who, building
up Sion in blood, secure ecclesiastical dignities for their nephews and pupils,
before they are seasoned by the course of nature or ripeness of learning.

Alas! by the same disease which we are deploring, we see that the Palladium
of Paris has been carried off in these sad times of ours, wherein the zeal of
that noble university, whose rays once shed light into every corner of the
world, has grown lukewarm, nay, is all but frozen. There the pen of every scribe
is now at rest, generations of books no longer succeed each other, and there is
none who begins to take place as a new author. They wrap up their doctrines in
unskilled discourse, and are losing all propriety of logic, except that our
English subtleties, which they denounce in public, are the subject of their
furtive vigils.

Admirable Minerva seems to bend her course to all the nations of the earth,
and reacheth from end to end mightily, that she may reveal herself to all
mankind. We see that she has already visited the Indians, the Babylonians, the
Egyptians and Greeks, the Arabs and the Romans. Now she has passed by Paris, and
now has happily come to Britain, the most noble of islands, nay, rather a
microcosm in itself, that she may show herself a debtor both to the Greeks and
to the Barbarians. At which wondrous sight it is conceived by most men, that as
philosophy is now lukewarm in France, so her soldiery are unmanned and
languishing.

While assiduously seeking out the wisdom of the men of old, according to the
counsel of the Wise Man (Eccles. xxxix.): The wise man, he says, will seek out
the wisdom of all the ancients, we have not thought fit to be misled into the
opinion that the first founders of the arts have purged away all crudeness,
knowing that the discoveries of each of the faithful, when weighed in a faithful
balance, makes a tiny portion of science, but that by the anxious investigations
of a multitude of scholars, each as it were contributing his share, the mighty
bodies of the sciences have grown by successive augmentations to the immense
bulk that we now behold. For the disciples, continually melting down the
doctrines of their masters, and passing them again through the furnace, drove
off the dross that had been previously overlooked, until there came out refined
gold tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times to perfection, and
stained by no admixture of error or doubt.

For not even Aristotle, although a man of gigantic intellect, in whom it
pleased Nature to try how much of reason she could bestow upon mortality, and
whom the Most High made only a little lower than the angels, sucked from his own
fingers those wonderful volumes which the whole world can hardly contain. But,
on the contrary, with lynx-eyed penetration he had seen through the sacred books
of the Hebrews, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Chaldaeans, the Persians and
the Medes, all of which learned Greece had transferred into her treasuries.
Whose true sayings he received, but smoothed away their crudities, pruned their
superfluities, supplied their deficiencies, and removed their errors. And he
held that we should give thanks not only to those who teach rightly, but even to
those who err, as affording the way of more easily investigating truth, as he
plainly declares in the second book of his Metaphysics. Thus many learned
lawyers contributed to the Pandects, many physicians to the Tegni, and it was by
this means that Avicenna edited his Canon, and Pliny his great work on Natural
History, and Ptolemy the Almagest.

For as in the writers of annals it is not difficult to see that the later
writer always presupposes the earlier, without whom he could by no means relate
the former times, so too we are to think of the authors of the sciences. For no
man by himself has brought forth any science, since between the earliest
students and those of the latter time we find intermediaries, ancient if they be
compared with our own age, but modern if we think of the foundations of
learning, and these men we consider the most learned. What would Virgil, the
chief poet among the Latins, have achieved, if he had not despoiled Theocritus,
Lucretius, and Homer, and had not ploughed with their heifer? What, unless again
and again he had read somewhat of Parthenius and Pindar, whose eloquence he
could by no means imitate? What could Sallust, Tully, Boethius, Macrobius,
Lactantius, Martianus, and in short the whole troop of Latin writers have done,
if they had not seen the productions of Athens or the volumes of the Greeks?
Certes, little would Jerome, master of three languages, Ambrosius, Augustine,
though he confesses that he hated Greek, or even Gregory, who is said to have
been wholly ignorant of it, have contributed to the doctrine of the Church, if
more learned Greece had not furnished them from its stores. As Rome, watered by
the streams of Greece, had earlier brought forth philosophers in the image of
the Greeks, in like fashion afterwards it produced doctors of the orthodox
faith. The creeds we chant are the sweat of Grecian brows, promulgated by their
Councils, and established by the martyrdom of many.

Yet their natural slowness, as it happens, turns to the glory of the Latins,
since as they were less learned in their studies, so they were less perverse in
their errors. In truth, the Arian heresy had all but eclipsed the whole Church;
the Nestorian wickedness presumed to rave with blasphemous rage against the
Virgin, for it would have robbed the Queen of Heaven, not in open fight but in
disputation, of her name and character as Mother of God, unless the invincible
champion Cyril, ready to do single battle, with the help of the Council of
Ephesus, had in vehemence of spirit utterly extinguished it. Innumerable are the
forms as well as the authors of Greek heresies; for as they were the original
cultivators of our holy faith, so too they were the first sowers of tares, as is
shown by veracious history. And thus they went on from bad to worse, because in
endeavouring to part the seamless vesture of the Lord, they totally destroyed
primitive simplicity of doctrine, and blinded by the darkness of novelty would
fall into the bottomless pit, unless He provide for them in His inscrutable
prerogative, whose wisdom is past reckoning.

Let this suffice; for here we reach the limit of our power of judgment. One
thing, however, we conclude from the premises, that the ignorance of the Greek
tongue is now a great hindrance to the study of the Latin writers, since without
it the doctrines of the ancient authors, whether Christian or Gentile, cannot be
understood. And we must come to a like judgment as to Arabic in numerous
astronomical treatises, and as to Hebrew as regards the text of the Holy Bible,
which deficiencies, indeed, Clement V. provides for, if only the bishops would
faithfully observe what they so lightly decree. Wherefore we have taken care to
provide a Greek as well as a Hebrew grammar for our scholars, with certain other
aids, by the help of which studious readers may greatly inform themselves in the
writing, reading, and understanding of the said tongues, although only the
hearing of them can teach correctness of idiom.

That lucrative practice of positive law, designed for the dispensation of
earthly things, the more useful it is found by the children of this world, so
much the less does it aid the children of light in comprehending the mysteries
of holy writ and the secret sacraments of the faith, seeing that it disposes us
peculiarly to the friendship of the world, by which man, as S. James testifies,
is made the enemy of God. Law indeed encourages rather than extinguishes the
contentions of mankind, which are the result of unbounded greed, by complicated
laws, which can be turned either way; though we know that it was created by
jurisconsults and pious princes for the purpose of assuaging these contentions.
But in truth, as the same science deals with contraries, and the power of reason
can be used to opposite ends, and at the same the human mind is more inclined to
evil, it happens with the practisers of this science that they usually devote
themselves to promoting contention rather than peace, and instead of quoting
laws according to the intent of the legislator, violently strain the language
thereof to effect their own purposes.

Wherefore, although the over-mastering love of books has possessed our mind
from boyhood, and to rejoice in their delights has been our only pleasure, yet
the appetite for the books of the civil law took less hold of our affections,
and we have spent but little labour and expense in acquiring volumes of this
kind. For they are useful only as the scorpion in treacle, as Aristotle, the sun
of science, has said of logic in his book De Pomo. We have noticed a certain
manifest difference of nature between law and science, in that every science is
delighted and desires to open its inward parts and display the very heart of its
principles, and to show forth the roots from which it buds and flourishes, and
that the emanation of its springs may be seen of all men; for thus from the
cognate and harmonious light of the truth of conclusion to principles, the whole
body of science will be full of light, having no part dark. But laws, on the
contrary, since they are only human enactments for the regulation of social
life, or the yokes of princes thrown over the necks of their subjects, refuse to
be brought to the standard of synteresis, the origin of equity, because they
feel that they possess more of arbitrary will than rational judgment. Wherefore
the judgment of the wise for the most part is that the causes of laws are not a
fit subject of discussion. In truth, many laws acquire force by mere custom, not
by syllogistic necessity, like the arts: as Aristotle, the Phoebus of the
Schools, urges in the second book of the Politics, where he confutes the policy
of Hippodamus, which holds out rewards to the inventors of new laws, because to
abrogate old laws and establish new ones is to weaken the force of those which
exist. For whatever receives its stability from use alone must necessarily be
brought to nought by disuse.

From which it is seen clearly enough, that as laws are neither arts nor
sciences, so books of law cannot properly be called books of art or science. Nor
is this faculty which we may call by a special term geologia, or the earthly
science, to be properly numbered among the sciences. Now the books of the
liberal arts are so useful to the divine writings, that without their aid the
intellect would vainly aspire to understand them.

While we were constantly delighting ourselves with the reading of books,
which it was our custom to read or have read to us every day, we noticed plainly
how much the defective knowledge even of a single word hinders the
understanding, as the meaning of no sentence can be apprehended, if any part of
it be not understood. Wherefore we ordered the meanings of foreign words to be
noted with particular care, and studied the orthography, prosody, etymology, and
syntax in ancient grammarians with unrelaxing carefulness, and took pains to
elucidate terms that had grown too obscure by age with suitable explanations, in
order to make a smooth path for our students.

This is the whole reason why we took care to replace the antiquated volumes
of the grammarians by improved codices, that we might make royal roads, by which
our scholars in time to come might attain without stumbling to any science.

All the varieties of attack directed against the poets by the lovers of naked
truth may be repelled by a two-fold defence: either that even in an unseemly
subject-matter we may learn a charming fashion of speech, or that where a
fictitious but becoming subject is handled, natural or historical truth is
pursued under the guise of allegorical fiction.

Although it is true that all men naturally desire knowledge, yet they do not
all take the same pleasure in learning. On the contrary, when they have
experienced the labour of study and find their senses wearied, most men
inconsiderately fling away the nut, before they have broken the shell and
reached the kernel. For man is naturally fond of two things, namely, freedom
from control and some pleasure in his activity; for which reason no one without
reason submits himself to the control of others, or willingly engages in any
tedious task. For pleasure crowns activity, as beauty is a crown to youth, as
Aristotle truly asserts in the tenth book of the Ethics. Accordingly the wisdom
of the ancients devised a remedy by which to entice the wanton minds of men by a
kind of pious fraud, the delicate Minerva secretly lurking beneath the mask of
pleasure. We are wont to allure children by rewards, that they may cheerfully
learn what we force them to study even though they are unwilling. For our fallen
nature does not tend to virtue with the same enthusiasm with which it rushes
into vice. Horace has expressed this for us in a brief verse of the Ars Poetica,
where he says:

All poets sing to profit or delight.

And he has plainly intimated the same thing in another verse of the same
book, where he says:

He hits the mark, who mingles joy with use.

How many students of Euclid have been repelled by the Pons Asinorum, as by a
lofty and precipitous rock, which no help of ladders could enable them to scale!
THIS IS A HARD SAYING, they exclaim, AND WHO CAN RECEIVE IT. The child of
inconstancy, who ended by wishing to be transformed into an ass, would perhaps
never have given up the study of philosophy, if he had met him in friendly guise
veiled under the cloak of pleasure; but anon, astonished by Crato's chair and
struck dumb by his endless questions, as by a sudden thunderbolt, he saw no
refuge but in flight.

So much we have alleged in defence of the poets; and now we proceed to show
that those who study them with proper intent are not to be condemned in regard
to them. For our ignorance of one single word prevents the understanding of a
whole long sentence, as was assumed in the previous chapter. As now the sayings
of the saints frequently allude to the inventions of the poets, it must needs
happen that through our not knowing the poem referred to, the whole meaning of
the author is completely obscured, and assuredly, as Cassiodorus says in his
book Of the Institutes of Sacred Literature: Those things are not to be
considered trifles without which great things cannot come to pass. It follows
therefore that through ignorance of poetry we do not understand Jerome,
Augustine, Boethius, Lactantius, Sidonius, and very many others, a catalogue of
whom would more than fill a long chapter.

The Venerable Bede has very clearly discussed and determined this doubtful
point, as is related by that great compiler Gratian, the repeater of numerous
authors, who is as confused in form as he was eager in collecting matter for his
compilation. Now he writes in his 37th section: Some read secular literature for
pleasure, taking delight in the inventions and elegant language of the poets;
but others study this literature for the sake of scholarship, that by their
reading they may learn to detest the errors of the Gentiles and may devoutly
apply what they find useful in them to the use of sacred learning. Such men
study secular literature in a laudable manner. So far Bede.

Taking this salutary instruction to heart, let the detractors of those who
study the poets henceforth hold their peace, and let not those who are ignorant
of these things require that others should be as ignorant as themselves, for
this is the consolation of the wretched. And therefore let every man see that
his own intentions are upright, and he may thus make of any subject, observing
the limitations of virtue, a study acceptable to God. And if he have found
profit in poetry, as the great Virgil relates that he had done in Ennius, he
will not have done amiss.

To him who recollects what has been said before, it is plain and evident who
ought to be the chief lovers of books. For those who have most need of wisdom in
order to perform usefully the duties of their position, they are without doubt
most especially bound to show more abundantly to the sacred vessels of wisdom
the anxious affection of a grateful heart. Now it is the office of the wise man
to order rightly both himself and others, according to the Phoebus of
philosophers, Aristotle, who deceives not nor is deceived in human things.
Wherefore princes and prelates, judges and doctors, and all other leaders of the
commonwealth, as more than others they have need of wisdom, so more than others
ought they to show zeal for the vessels of wisdom.

Boethius, indeed, beheld Philosophy bearing a sceptre in her left hand and
books in her right, by which it is evidently shown to all men that no one can
rightly rule a commonwealth without books. Thou, says Boethius, speaking to
Philosophy, hast sanctioned this saying by the mouth of Plato, that states would
be happy if they were ruled by students of philosophy, or if their rulers would
study philosophy. And again, we are taught by the very gesture of the figure
that in so far as the right hand is better than the left, so far the
contemplative life is more worthy than the active life; and at the same time we
are shown that the business of the wise man is to devote himself by turns, now
to the study of truth, and now to the dispensation of temporal things.

We read that Philip thanked the Gods devoutly for having granted that
Alexander should be born in the time of Aristotle, so that educated under his
instruction he might be worthy to rule his father's empire. While Phaeton
unskilled in driving becomes the charioteer of his father's car, he unhappily
distributes to mankind the heat of Phoebus, now by excessive nearness, and now
by withdrawing it too far, and so, lest all beneath him should be imperilled by
the closeness of his driving, justly deserved to be struck by the thunderbolt.

The history of the Greeks as well as Romans shows that there were no famous
princes among them who were devoid of literature. The sacred law of Moses in
prescribing to the king a rule of government, enjoins him to have a copy made of
the book of Divine law (Deut. xvii.) according to the copy shown by the priests,
in which he was to read all the days of his life. Certes, God Himself, who hath
made and who fashioneth every day the hearts of every one of us, knows the
feebleness of human memory and the instability of virtuous intentions in
mankind. Wherefore He has willed that books should be as it were an antidote to
all evil, the reading and use of which He has commanded to be the healthful
daily nourishment of the soul, so that by them the intellect being refreshed and
neither weak nor doubtful should never hesitate in action. This subject is
elegantly handled by John of Salisbury, in his Policraticon. In conclusion, all
classes of men who are conspicuous by the tonsure or the sign of clerkship,
against whom books lifted up their voices in the fourth, fifth, and sixth
chapters, are bound to serve books with perpetual veneration.

It transcends the power of human intellect, however deeply it may have drunk
of the Pegasean fount, to develop fully the title of the present chapter. Though
one should speak with the tongue of men and angels, though he should become a
Mercury or Tully, though he should grow sweet with the milky eloquence of Livy,
yet he will plead the stammering of Moses, or with Jeremiah will confess that he
is but a boy and cannot speak, or will imitate Echo rebounding from the
mountains. For we know that the love of books is the same thing as the love of
wisdom, as was proved in the second chapter. Now this love is called by the
Greek word philosophy, the whole virtue of which no created intelligence can
comprehend; for she is believed to be the mother of all good things: Wisdom vii.
She as a heavenly dew extinguishes the heats of fleshly vices, the intense
activity of the mental forces relaxing the vigour of the animal forces, and
slothfulness being wholly put to flight, which being gone all the bows of Cupid
are unstrung.

Hence Plato says in the Phaedo: The philosopher is manifest in this, that he
dissevers the soul from communion with the body. Love, says Jerome, the
knowledge of the scriptures, and thou wilt not love the vices of the flesh. The
godlike Xenocrates showed this by the firmness of his reason, who was declared
by the famous hetaera Phryne to be a statue and not a man, when all her
blandishments could not shake his resolve, as Valerius Maximus relates at
length. Our own Origen showed this also, who chose rather to be unsexed by the
mutilation of himself, than to be made effeminate by the omnipotence of
woman--though it was a hasty remedy, repugnant alike to nature and to virtue,
whose place it is not to make men insensible to passion, but to slay with the
dagger of reason the passions that spring from instinct.

Again, all who are smitten with the love of books think cheaply of the world
and wealth; as Jerome says to Vigilantius: The same man cannot love both gold
and books. And thus it has been said in verse:

No iron-stained hand is fit to handle books, Nor he whose heart on gold so
gladly looks: The same men love not books and money both, And books thy herd, O
Epicurus, loathe; Misers and bookmen make poor company, Nor dwell in peace
beneath the same roof-tree. No man, therefore, can serve both books and Mammon.

The hideousness of vice is greatly reprobated in books, so that he who loves
to commune with books is led to detest all manner of vice. The demon, who
derives his name from knowledge, is most effectually defeated by the knowledge
of books, and through books his multitudinous deceits and the endless labyrinths
of his guile are laid bare to those who read, lest he be transformed into an
angel of light and circumvent the innocent by his wiles. The reverence of God is
revealed to us by books, the virtues by which He is worshipped are more
expressly manifested, and the rewards are described that are promised by the
truth, which deceives not, neither is deceived. The truest likeness of the
beatitude to come is the contemplation of the sacred writings, in which we
behold in turn the Creator and the creature, and draw from streams of perpetual
gladness. Faith is established by the power of books; hope is strengthened by
their solace, insomuch that by patience and the consolation of scripture we are
in good hope. Charity is not puffed up, but is edified by the knowledge of true
learning, and, indeed, it is clearer than light that the Church is established
upon the sacred writings.

Books delight us, when prosperity smiles upon us; they comfort us inseparably
when stormy fortune frowns on us. They lend validity to human compacts, and no
serious judgments are propounded without their help. Arts and sciences, all the
advantages of which no mind can enumerate, consist in books. How highly must we
estimate the wondrous power of books, since through them we survey the utmost
bounds of the world and time, and contemplate the things that are as well as
those that are not, as it were in the mirror of eternity. In books we climb
mountains and scan the deepest gulfs of the abyss; in books we behold the finny
tribes that may not exist outside their native waters, distinguish the
properties of streams and springs and of various lands; from books we dig out
gems and metals and the materials of every kind of mineral, and learn the
virtues of herbs and trees and plants, and survey at will the whole progeny of
Neptune, Ceres, and Pluto.

But if we please to visit the heavenly inhabitants, Taurus, Caucasus, and
Olympus are at hand, from which we pass beyond the realms of Juno and mark out
the territories of the seven planets by lines and circles. And finally we
traverse the loftiest firmament of all, adorned with signs, degrees, and figures
in the utmost variety. There we inspect the antarctic pole, which eye hath not
seen, nor ear heard; we admire the luminous Milky Way and the Zodiac,
marvellously and delightfully pictured with celestial animals. Thence by books
we pass on to separate substances, that the intellect may greet kindred
intelligences, and with the mind's eye may discern the First Cause of all things
and the Unmoved Mover of infinite virtue, and may immerse itself in love without
end. See how with the aid of books we attain the reward of our beatitude, while
we are yet sojourners below.

Why need we say more? Certes, just as we have learnt on the authority of
Seneca, leisure without letters is death and the sepulture of the living, so
contrariwise we conclude that occupation with letters or books is the life of
man.

Again, by means of books we communicate to friends as well as foes what we
cannot safely entrust to messengers; since the book is generally allowed access
to the chambers of princes, from which the voice of its author would be rigidly
excluded, as Tertullian observes at the beginning of his Apologeticus. When shut
up in prison and in bonds, and utterly deprived of bodily liberty, we use books
as ambassadors to our friends, and entrust them with the conduct of our cause,
and send them where to go ourselves would incur the penalty of death. By the aid
of books we remember things that are past, and even prophesy as to the future;
and things present, which shift and flow, we perpetuate by committing them to
writing.

The felicitous studiousness and the studious felicity of the all-powerful
eunuch, of whom we are told in the Acts, who had been so mightily kindled by the
love of the prophetic writings that he ceased not from his reading by reason of
his journey, had banished all thought of the populous palace of Queen Candace,
and had forgotten even the treasures of which he was the keeper, and had
neglected alike his journey and the chariot in which he rode. Love of his book
alone had wholly engrossed this domicile of chastity, under whose guidance he
soon deserved to enter the gate of faith. O gracious love of books, which by the
grace of baptism transformed the child of Gehenna and nursling of Tartarus into
a Son of the Kingdom!

Let the feeble pen now cease from the tenor of an infinite task, lest it seem
foolishly to undertake what in the beginning it confessed to be impossible to
any.

Just as it is necessary for the state to prepare arms and to provide abundant
stores of victuals for the soldiers who are to fight for it, so it is fitting
for the Church Militant to fortify itself against the assaults of pagans and
heretics with a multitude of sound writings.

But because all the appliances of mortal men with the lapse of time suffer
the decay of mortality, it is needful to replace the volumes that are worn out
with age by fresh successors, that the perpetuity of which the individual is by
its nature incapable may be secured to the species; and hence it is that the
Preacher says: Of making many books there is no end. For as the bodies of books,
seeing that they are formed of a combination of contrary elements, undergo a
continual dissolution of their structure, so by the forethought of the clergy a
remedy should be found, by means of which the sacred book paying the debt of
nature may obtain a natural heir and may raise up like seed to its dead brother,
and thus may be verified that saying of Ecclesiasticus: His father is dead, and
he is as if he were not dead; for he hath left one behind him that is like
himself. And thus the transcription of ancient books is as it were the begetting
of fresh sons, on whom the office of the father may devolve, lest it suffer
detriment. Now such transcribers are called antiquarii, whose occupations
Cassiodorus confesses please him above all the tasks of bodily labour, adding:
"Happy effort," he says, "laudable industry, to preach to men
with the hand, to let loose tongues with the fingers, silently to give salvation
to mortals, and to fight with pen and ink against the illicit wiles of the Evil
One." So far Cassiodorus. Moreover, our Saviour exercised the office of the
scribe when He stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground (John
viii.), that no one, however exalted, may think it unworthy of him to do what he
sees the wisdom of God the Father did.

O singular serenity of writing, to practise which the Artificer of the world
stoops down, at whose dread name every knee doth bow! O venerable handicraft
pre-eminent above all other crafts that are practised by the hand of man, to
which our Lord humbly inclines His breast, to which the finger of God is
applied, performing the office of a pen! We do not read of the Son of God that
He sowed or ploughed, wove or digged; nor did any other of the mechanic arts
befit the divine wisdom incarnate except to trace letters in writing, that every
gentleman and sciolist may know that fingers are given by God to men for the
task of writing rather than for war. Wherefore we entirely approve the judgment
of books, wherein they declared in our sixth chapter the clerk who cannot write
to be as it were disabled.

God himself inscribes the just in the book of the living; Moses received the
tables of stone written with the finger of God. Job desires that he himself that
judgeth would write a book. Belshazzar trembled when he saw the fingers of a
man's hand writing upon the wall, Mene tekel phares. I wrote, says Jeremiah,
with ink in the book. Christ bids his beloved disciple John, What thou seest
write in a book. So the office of the writer is enjoined on Isaiah and on
Joshua, that the act and skill of writing may be commended to future
generations. Christ Himself has written on His vesture and on His thigh King of
Kings and Lord of Lords, so that without writing the royal ornaments of the
Omnipotent cannot be made perfect. Being dead they cease not to teach, who write
books of sacred learning. Paul did more for building up the fabric of the Church
by writing his holy epistles, than by preaching by word of mouth to Jews and
Gentiles. He who has attained the prize continues daily by books, what he long
ago began while a sojourner upon the earth; and thus is fulfilled in the doctors
writing books the saying of the Prophet: They that turn many to righteousness
shall be as the stars for ever and ever.

Moreover, it has been determined by the doctors of the Church that the
longevity of the ancients, before God destroyed the original world by the
Deluge, is to be ascribed to a miracle and not to nature; as though God granted
to them such length of days as was required for finding out the sciences and
writing them in books; amongst which the wonderful variety of astronomy
required, according to Josephus, a period of six hundred years, to submit it to
ocular observation. Nor, indeed, do they deny that the fruits of the earth in
that primitive age afforded a more nutritious aliment to men than in our modern
times, and thus they had not only a livelier energy of body, but also a more
lengthened period of vigour; to which it contributed not a little that they
lived according to virtue and denied themselves all luxurious delights. Whoever
therefore is by the good gift of God endowed with gift of science, let him,
according to the counsel of the Holy Spirit, write wisdom in his time of leisure
(Eccles. xxxviii.), that his reward may be with the blessed and his days may be
lengthened in this present world.

And further, if we turn our discourse to the princes of the world, we find
that famous emperors not only attained excellent skill in the art of writing,
but indulged greatly in its practice. Julius Caesar, the first and greatest of
them all, has left us Commentaries on the Gallic and the Civil Wars written by
himself; he wrote also two books De Analogia, and two books of Anticatones, and
a poem called Iter; and many other works. Julius and Augustus devised means of
writing one letter for another, and so concealing what they wrote. For Julius
put the fourth letter for the first, and so on through the alphabet; whilst
Augustus used the second for the first, the third for the second, and so
throughout. He is said in the greatest difficulties of affairs during the
Mutinensian War to have read and written and even declaimed every day. Tiberius
wrote a lyric poem and some Greek verses. Claudius likewise was skilled in both
Greek and Latin, and wrote several books. But Titus was skilled above all men in
the art of writing, and easily imitated any hand he chose; so that he used to
say that if he had wished it he might have become a most skilful forger. All
these things are noted by Suetonius in his Lives of the XII. Caesars.

We are not only rendering service to God in preparing volumes of new books,
but also exercising an office of sacred piety when we treat books carefully, and
again when we restore them to their proper places and commend them to inviolable
custody; that they may rejoice in purity while we have them in our hands, and
rest securely when they are put back in their repositories. And surely next to
the vestments and vessels dedicated to the Lord's body, holy books deserve to be
rightly treated by the clergy, to which great injury is done so often as they
are touched by unclean hands. Wherefore we deem it expedient to warn our
students of various negligences, which might always be easily avoided and do
wonderful harm to books.

And in the first place as to the opening and closing of books, let there be
due moderation, that they be not unclasped in precipitate haste, nor when we
have finished our inspection be put away without being duly closed. For it
behoves us to guard a book much more carefully than a boot.

But the race of scholars is commonly badly brought up, and unless they are
bridled in by the rules of their elders they indulge in infinite puerilities.
They behave with petulance, and are puffed up with presumption, judging of
everything as if they were certain, though they are altogether inexperienced.

You may happen to see some headstrong youth lazily lounging over his studies,
and when the winter's frost is sharp, his nose running from the nipping cold
drips down, nor does he think of wiping it with his pocket-handkerchief until he
has bedewed the book before him with the ugly moisture. Would that he had before
him no book, but a cobbler's apron! His nails are stuffed with fetid filth as
black as jet, with which he marks any passage that pleases him. He distributes a
multitude of straws, which he inserts to stick out in different places, so that
the halm may remind him of what his memory cannot retain. These straws, because
the book has no stomach to digest them, and no one takes them out, first distend
the book from its wonted closing, and at length, being carelessly abandoned to
oblivion, go to decay. He does not fear to eat fruit or cheese over an open
book, or carelessly to carry a cup to and from his mouth; and because he has no
wallet at hand he drops into books the fragments that are left. Continually
chattering, he is never weary of disputing with his companions, and while he
alleges a crowd of senseless arguments, he wets the book lying half open in his
lap with sputtering showers. Aye, and then hastily folding his arms he leans
forward on the book, and by a brief spell of study invites a prolonged nap; and
then, by way of mending the wrinkles, he folds back the margin of the leaves, to
the no small injury of the book. Now the rain is over and gone, and the flowers
have appeared in our land. Then the scholar we are speaking of, a neglecter
rather than an inspecter of books, will stuff his volume with violets, and
primroses, with roses and quatrefoil. Then he will use his wet and perspiring
hands to turn over the volumes; then he will thump the white vellum with gloves
covered with all kinds of dust, and with his finger clad in long-used leather
will hunt line by line through the page; then at the sting of the biting flea
the sacred book is flung aside, and is hardly shut for another month, until it
is so full of the dust that has found its way within, that it resists the effort
to close it.

But the handling of books is specially to be forbidden to those shameless
youths, who as soon as they have learned to form the shapes of letters,
straightway, if they have the opportunity, become unhappy commentators, and
wherever they find an extra margin about the text, furnish it with monstrous
alphabets, or if any other frivolity strikes their fancy, at once their pen
begins to write it. There the Latinist and sophister and every unlearned writer
tries the fitness of his pen, a practice that we have frequently seen injuring
the usefulness and value of the most beautiful books.

Again, there is a class of thieves shamefully mutilating books, who cut away
the margins from the sides to use as material for letters, leaving only the
text, or employ the leaves from the ends, inserted for the protection of the
book, for various uses and abuses-- a kind of sacrilege which should be
prohibited by the threat of anathema.

Again, it is part of the decency of scholars that whenever they return from
meals to their study, washing should invariably precede reading, and that no
grease-stained finger should unfasten the clasps, or turn the leaves of a book.
Nor let a crying child admire the pictures in the capital letters, lest he soil
the parchment with wet fingers; for a child instantly touches whatever he sees.
Moreover, the laity, who look at a book turned upside down just as if it were
open in the right way, are utterly unworthy of any communion with books. Let the
clerk take care also that the smutty scullion reeking from his stewpots does not
touch the lily leaves of books, all unwashed, but he who walketh without blemish
shall minister to the precious volumes. And, again, the cleanliness of decent
hands would be of great benefit to books as well as scholars, if it were not
that the itch and pimples are characteristic of the clergy.

Whenever defects are noticed in books, they should be promptly repaired,
since nothing spreads more quickly than a tear and a rent which is neglected at
the time will have to be repaired afterwards with usury.

Moses, the gentlest of men, teaches us to make bookcases most neatly, wherein
they may be protected from any injury: Take, he says, this book of the law, and
put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God. O fitting
place and appropriate for a library, which was made of imperishable
shittim-wood, and was all covered within and without with gold! But the Saviour
also has warned us by His example against all unbecoming carelessness in the
handling of books, as we read in S. Luke. For when He had read the scriptural
prophecy of Himself in the book that was delivered to Him, He did not give it
again to the minister, until He had closed it with his own most sacred hands. By
which students are most clearly taught that in the care of books the merest
trifles ought not to be neglected.

SHOWETH THAT WE HAVE COLLECTED SO GREAT STORE OF BOOKS
FOR THE COMMON BENEFIT OF SCHOLARS AND NOT ONLY FOR OUR OWN PLEASURE

Nothing in human affairs is more unjust than that those things which are most
righteously done, should be perverted by the slanders of malicious men, and that
one should bear the reproach of sin where he has rather deserved the hope of
honour. Many things are done with singleness of eye, the right hand knoweth not
what the left hand doth, the lump is uncorrupted by leaven, nor is the garment
woven of wool and linen; and yet by the trickery of perverse men a pious work is
mendaciously transformed into some monstrous act. Certes, such is the unhappy
condition of sinful nature, that not merely in acts that are morally doubtful it
adopts the worse conclusion; but often it depraves by iniquitous subversion
those which have the appearance of rectitude.

For although the love of books from the nature of its object bears the aspect
of goodness, yet, wonderful to say, it has rendered us obnoxious to the censures
of many, by whose astonishment we were disparaged and censured, now for excess
of curiosity, now for the exhibition of vanity, now for intemperance of delight
in literature; though indeed we were no more disturbed by their vituperation
than by the barking of so many dogs, satisfied with the testimony of Him to whom
it appertaineth to try the hearts and reins. For as the aim and purpose of our
inmost will is inscrutable to men and is seen of God alone, the searcher of
hearts, they deserve to be rebuked for their pernicious temerity, who so eagerly
set a mark of condemnation upon human acts, the ultimate springs of which they
cannot see. For the final end in matters of conduct holds the same position as
first principles in speculative science or axioms in mathematics, as the chief
of philosophers, Aristotle, points out in the seventh book of the Ethics. And
therefore, just as the truth of our conclusions depends upon the correctness of
our premises, so in matters of action the stamp of moral rectitude is given by
the honesty of aim and purpose, in cases where the act itself would otherwise be
held to be morally indifferent.

Now we have long cherished in our heart of hearts the fixed resolve, when
Providence should grant a favourable opportunity, to found in perpetual charity
a Hall in the reverend university of Oxford, the chief nursing mother of all
liberal arts, and to endow it with the necessary revenues, for the maintenance
of a number of scholars; and moreover to enrich the Hall with the treasures of
our books, that all and every of them should be in common as regards their use
and study, not only to the scholars of the said Hall, but by their means to all
the students of the before-named university for ever, in the form and manner
which the following chapter shall declare. Wherefore the sincere love of study
and zeal for the strengthening of the orthodox faith to the edifying of the
Church, have begotten in us that solicitude so marvellous to the lovers of pelf,
of collecting books wherever they were to be purchased, regardless of expense,
and of having those that could not he bought fairly transcribed.

For as the favourite occupations of men are variously distinguished according
to the disposition of the heavenly bodies, which frequently control our natural
composition, so that some men choose to devote themselves to architecture,
others to agriculture, others to hunting, others to navigation, others to war,
others to games, we have under the aspect of Mercury entertained a blameless
pleasure in books, which under the rule of right reason, over which no stars are
dominant, we have ordered to the glory of the Supreme Being, that where our
minds found tranquillity and peace, thence also might spring a most devout
service of God. And therefore let our detractors cease, who are as blind men
judging of colours; let not bats venture to speak of light; and let not those
who carry beams in their own eyes presume to pull the mote out of their
brother's eye. Let them cease to jeer with satirical taunts at things of which
they are ignorant, and to discuss hidden things that are not revealed to the
eyes of men; who perchance would have praised and commended us, if we had spent
our time in hunting, dice-playing, or courting the smiles of ladies.

It has ever been difficult so to restrain men by the laws of rectitude, that
the astuteness of successors might not strive to transgress the bounds of their
predecessors, and to infringe established rules in insolence of licence.
Accordingly, with the advice of prudent men, we have prescribed the manner in
which we desire that the communication and use of our books should be permitted
for the benefit of students.

Imprimis, we give and grant all and singular the books, of which we have made
a special catalogue, in consideration of affection, to the community of scholars
living in ---- Hall at Oxford, as a perpetual gift, for our soul and the souls
of our parents, and also for the soul of the most illustrious King Edward the
Third from the Conquest, and of the most pious Queen Philippa, his consort: to
the intent that the same books may be lent from time to time to all and singular
the scholars and masters of the said place, as well regular as secular, for the
advancement and use of study, in the manner immediately following, that is to
say:

Five of the scholars sojourning in the Hall aforesaid shall be appointed by
the Master thereof, who shall have the charge of all the books, of which five
persons three and not fewer may lend any book or books for inspection and study;
but for copying or transcribing we direct that no book shall be allowed outside
the walls of the house. Therefore, when any scholar secular or religious, whom
for this purpose we regard with equal favour, shall seek to borrow any book, let
the keepers diligently consider if they have a duplicate of the said book, and
if so, let them lend him the book, taking such pledge as in their judgment
exceeds the value of the book delivered, and let a record be made forthwith of
the pledge and of the book lent, containing the names of the persons delivering
the book and of the person who receives it, together with the day and year when
the loan is made.

But if the keepers find that the book asked for is not in duplicate, they
shall not lend such book to any one whomsoever, unless he shall belong to the
community of scholars of the said Hall, unless perhaps for inspection within the
walls of the aforesaid house or Hall, but not to be carried beyond it.

But to any of the scholars of the said Hall, any book may be lent by three of
the aforesaid keepers, after first recording, however, his name, with the day on
which he receives the book. Nevertheless, the borrower may not lend the book
entrusted to him to another, except with the permission of three of the
aforesaid keepers, and then the name of the first borrower being erased, the
name of the second with the time of delivery is to be recorded.

Each keeper shall take an oath to observe all these regulations when they
enter upon the charge of the books. And the recipients of any book or books
shall thereupon swear that they will not use the book or books for any other
purpose but that of inspection or study, and that they will not take or permit
to be taken it or them beyond the town and suburbs of Oxford.

Moreover, every year the aforesaid keepers shall render an account to the
Master of the House and two of his scholars whom he shall associate with
himself, or if he shall not be at leisure, he shall appoint three inspectors,
other than the keepers, who shall peruse the catalogue of books, and see that
they have them all, either in the volumes themselves or at least as represented
by deposits. And the more fitting season for rendering this account we believe
to be from the First of July until the festival of the Translation of the
Glorious Martyr S. Thomas next following.

We add this further provision, that anyone to whom a book has been lent,
shall once a year exhibit it to the keepers, and shall, if he wishes it, see his
pledge. Moreover, if it chances that a book is lost by death, theft, fraud, or
carelessness, he who has lost it or his representative or executor shall pay the
value of the book and receive back his deposit. But if in any wise any profit
shall accrue to the keepers, it shall not be applied to any purpose but the
repair and maintenance of the books.

Time now clamours for us to terminate this treatise which we have composed
concerning the love of books; in which we have endeavoured to give the
astonishment of our contemporaries the reason why we have loved books so
greatly. But because it is hardly granted to mortals to accomplish aught that is
not rolled in the dust of vanity, we do not venture entirely to justify the
zealous love which we have so long had for books, or to deny that it may
perchance sometimes have been the occasion of some venial negligence, albeit the
object of our love is honourable and our intention upright. For if when we have
done everything, we are bound to call ourselves unprofitable servants; if the
most holy Job was afraid of all his works; if according to Isaiah all our
righteousness is as filthy rags, who shall presume to boast himself of the
perfection of any virtue, or deny that from some circumstance a thing may
deserve to be reprehended, which in itself perhaps was not reprehensible. For
good springs from one selfsame source, but evil arises in many ways, as
Dionysius informs us. Wherefore to make amends for our iniquities, by which we
acknowledge ourselves to have frequently offended the Creator of all things, in
asking the assistance of their prayers, we have thought fit to exhort our future
students to show their gratitude as well to us as to their other benefactors in
time to come by requiting our forethought for their benefit by spiritual
retribution. Let us live when dead in their memories, who have lived in our
benevolence before they were born, and live now sustained by our beneficence.
Let them implore the mercy of the Redeemer with unwearied prayer, that the pious
Judge may excuse our negligences, may pardon the wickedness of our sins, may
cover the lapses of our feebleness with the cloak of piety, and remit by His
divine goodness the offences of which we are ashamed and penitent. That He may
preserve to us for a due season of repentance the gifts of His good grace,
steadfastness of faith, loftiness of hope, and the widest charity to all men.
That He may turn our haughty will to lament its faults, that it may deplore its
past most vain elations, may retract its most bitter indignations, and detest
its most insane delectations. That His virtue may abound in us, when our own is
found wanting, and that He who freely consecrated our beginning by the sacrament
of baptism, and advanced our progress to the seat of the Apostles without any
desert of ours, may deign to fortify our outgoing by the fitting sacraments.
That we may be delivered from the lust of the flesh, that the fear of death may
utterly vanish and our spirit may desire to be dissolved and be with Christ, and
existing upon earth in body only, in thought and longing our conversation may be
in Heaven. That the Father of mercies and the God of all consolation may
graciously come to meet the prodigal returning from the husks; that He may
receive the piece of silver that has been lately found and transmit it by His
holy angels into His eternal treasury. That He may rebuke with His terrible
countenance, at the hour of our departure, the spirits of darkness, lest
Leviathan, that old serpent, lying hid at the gate of death, should spread
unforeseen snares for our feet. But when we shall be summoned to the awful
judgment-seat to give an account on the testimony of conscience of all things we
have done in the body, the God-Man may consider the price of the holy blood that
He has shed, and that the Incarnate Deity may note the frame of our carnal
nature, that our weakness may pass unpunished where infinite loving-kindness is
to be found, and that the soul of the wretched sinner may breathe again where
the peculiar office of the Judge is to show mercy. And further, let our students
be always diligent in invoking the refuge of our hope after God, the Virgin
Mother of God and Blessed Queen of Heaven, that we who for our manifold sins and
wickednesses have deserved the anger of the Judge, by the aid of her
ever-acceptable supplications may merit His forgiveness; that her pious hand may
depress the scale of the balance in which our small and few good deeds shall be
weighed, lest the heaviness of our sins preponderate and cast us down to the
bottomless pit of perdition. Moreover, let them ever venerate with due
observance the most deserving Confessor Cuthbert, the care of whose flock we
have unworthily undertaken, ever devoutly praying that he may deign to excuse by
his prayers his all-unworthy vicar, and may procure him whom he hath admitted as
his successor upon earth to be made his assessor in Heaven. Finally, let them
pray God with holy prayers as well of body as of soul, that He will restore the
spirit created in the image of the Trinity, after its sojourn in this miserable
world, to its primordial prototype, and grant to it for ever to enjoy the sight
of His countenance: through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

THE END OF THE PHILOBIBLON OF MASTER RICHARD DE
AUNGERVILLE, SURNAMED DE BURY, LATE BISHOP OF
DURHAM THIS TREATISE WAS FINISHED IN OUR
MANORHOUSE OF AUCKLAND ON THE 24TH
DAY OF JANUARY, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD
ONE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED AND
FORTY-FOUR, THE FIFTY-EIGHTH
EAR OF OUR AGE BEING EXACTLY
COMPLETED, AND THE ELEVENTH
YEAR OF OUR PONTIFICATE
DRAWING TO AN END;
TO THE GLORY
OF GOD.
AMEN.

[2] An unsuccessful attempt has been made to transfer the
authorship of the book to Robert Holkot. Various theories have been advanced
against Richard's claims. It is noteworthy that his contemporary Adam Murimuth
disparages him as "mediocriter literatus, volens tamen magnus clericus
reputari," but such disparagement must be taken with the utmost caution.
The really difficult fact to be accounted for is the omission on the part of
Chambre to mention the book.

[3] Mr. J. W. Clark puts the matter as
follows:--"Durham College, maintained by the Benedictines of Durham, was
supplied with books from the mother-house, lists of which have been preserved;
and subsequently a library was built there to contain the collection bequeathed
in 1345 by Richard de Bury" (The Care of Books, p. 142). Mr. Thomas points
out that De Bury's executors sold at least some portion of his books; and,
moreover, his biographer says nothing of a library at Oxford. Possibly the
scheme was never carried out. In the British Museum (Roy. 13 D. iv. 3) is a
large folio MS. of the works of John of Salisbury, which was one of the books
bought back from the Bishop's executors.